The Belfast born poet Michael Longley, who began this year by announcing "at the ripe old age of 61, I feel as though I've just started", scooped the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry yesterday.
The poet, whose work has been overshadowed by the superstar status of his friend Seamus Heaney, is having a dazzling renaissance, after a 12 year silence in the 1980s when he published no poems. Heaney himself called him "a keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders".
Or as his publishers, Cape, put it yesterday: "He's really on a roll."
In January he won the £10,000 TS Eliot prize, for his latest collection, The Weather in Japan.
The medal is awarded annually, in recognition of outstanding quality in a living poet, at the nomination of an expert committee currently chaired by the poet laureate, Andrew Motion.
The prize has gone to an eclectic list, including Stevie Smith, WH Auden and John Betjeman, since it was created by George V in 1933 at the suggestion of the then laureate, John Masefield.
The most recent recipients are the Australian poet Les Murray, the last nomination by laureate Ted Hughes - who won the medal himself in 1973 - and the 80-year-old Glaswegian poet Edwin Morgan, the first to be nominated by Andrew Motion.
Longley was born in Belfast in 1939, educated in Dublin, and worked as literature officer at the Arts Council of Northern Ireland until 1991.
Like Heaney, he became a critically and popularly acclaimed poet in the 1960s, both men writing out of their experience of a life in Northern Ireland frequently overshadowed by the Troubles.
Unlike the Nobel prize winning Heaney, Longley's career seemed to have petered out in the 1980s, when he published no new poems.
However, he made a spectacular return in 1991 with Gorse Fires, which was nominated for all the major poetry prizes and won the Whitbread award. Last year's collection, The Weather in Japan, won both the TS Eliot and the Hawthornden prizes.
The Queen's Medal announcement was made yesterday to mark the 437th anniversary of the birth of William Shakespeare.
The day was also marked, however, by a survey which would humble any poet. It was carried out for Lloyds TSB, and revealed that 25% of respondents could not remember the name of any play by Shakespeare, even though two-thirds insisted they had either seen or read one.
Detour
I want my funeral to include this detour
Down the single street of a small market town,
On either side of the procession such names
As Philbin, O'Malley, MacNamara, Keane.
A reverent pause to let a herd of milkers pass
Will bring me face to face with grubby parsnips,
Cauliflowers that glitter after a sunshower,
Then hay rakes, broom handles, gas cylinders.
Reflected in the slow sequence of shop windows
I shall be part of the action when his wife
Draining the potatoes into a steamy sink
Calls to the butcher to get ready for dinner
And the publican descends to change a barrel.
From behind the one locked door for miles around
I shall prolong a detailed conversation
With the man in the concrete telephone kiosk
About where my funeral might be going next.
Michael Longley
