In The Stairwell, his tenth collection, Michael Longleys themes and forms reach a new intensity. The second part of the book is a powerful sequence of elegies for his twin brother, Peter, and the dominant mood elsewhere is elegiac. The title poem begins I have been thinking about the music for my funeral ... The two parts are also linked by Homer. Longley is well-known for his Homeric versions, and the Iliad is a presiding presence both in poems about the Great War and in the range of imagery that gives his twins death a mythic dimension. Yet funeral music can be life-affirming. Longley has built this collection on intricate doublings, not only when he explores the tensions of twinship. The psychologically suggestive word stairwell is itself an ambiguous compound.
