Michael Longley is a patient, properly ambitious poet who has worked hard to achieve a distinctive style without appearing to question his deep trust in the resources of formality and pattern. His early poems are sometimes rather strenuous exercises in craftsmanship, models of determination which become exhausted by their refusal to stop until an argument has been pressed home; but the monotony of their attentuated structures is at the same time evidence of an admirable seriousness, a readiness to demonstrate the importance of apprenticeship rather than a bid to catch the eye too easily and too soon.

In the introduction to his 1968 pamphlet Secret Marriages,… Longley was already taking an intelligent, self-critical backward look at his "long preoccupation with form, with stanzaic patterns and rhyme—pushing a shape as far as it will go, exploring its capacities to control and its tendencies to disintegrate", and in his first...