Michael Longley: "Sipping at the Stars"

April 18, 2007 By: Marshall Cutchin

We came across a wonderful line by contemporary Irish poet Michael Longley in Laurel Maury’s review of his new Collected Poems. Longley’s sonnets are rich in natural wonder, as evidenced in these lines from “The Eel-Trap:”

I lie awake and my mind goes out to the otter
That might be drowning in the eel-trap:
your breathing
Falters as I follow you to the other lake
Below sleep, the brown trout sipping at the stars.

In the Los Angeles Times.