Trauma in Michael Longley’s War Poetry of the Troubles

Michael Longley’s poetry has responded to the Northern Irish Troubles with great skill and sensitivity. This article approaches his Troubles-related work from a trauma perspective. It reads this poetry as functioning as a form of palimpsest, whereby different conflicts and wars are transposed onto one another. Longley’s relationship to his father is given special focus, as it relates Longley’s Troubles verse to the memory of World War 1 through a prism of postmemory. Other contexts are important for Longley, though, and an interpretation of “Ceasefire” concludes that Longley’s acts of multidirectional memory cannot simply be defined as instances of historical witnessing but also involve imaginative and mythical manoeuvres.