Another Life: Now that, in this more ecological age, ash-scattering is taking over from the graveyard and granite slab, claims to the most lyrical locations may very properly be staked in verse, writes Michael Viney.
Thus, in his new collection of poems, Snow Water, Michael Longley gives notice of his powdery dissolution within the encircling boulders of a promontory fort, a space more usually reserved "For the otter to die and the mountain hare/ To lick snow stains from her underside,/ A table for the peregrine and ravens."
This modest hillock behind the Dooaghtry dunes is just visible from my window, and, two pages on, the poet generously registers my own posthumous design: "You want your ashes to swirl along the strand/At Thallabaun - amongst clockwork, approachable,/ Circumambulatory sanderlings, crab shells,/ Bladderwrack, phosphorescence at spring tide . . ."
This leads into 'Petalwort', a poem about a rare liverwort that happens to thrive in the dune slacks of Dooaghtry - a plant so small ("snail snack, angel's nosegay", as Longley has it) that it needs to be viewed with a magnifying glass, but might, as he suggests, do for my wreath.
We have shared this windswept, watery corner of south Mayo for much the same number of decades, watching, from our separate heights, the slow washing-away of the strand's own burial mound. This was an equally unofficial resting-place, originally a sandy headland settled by monks but eventually a tiny, dwindling island in the spring tides, shedding the occasional rough-slate gravestone. Haunt of birds and otters, it has been a landmark in many of Longley's best poems and appears almost ritually in Snow Water: "The tide-digested burial mound has almost gone./A peregrine is stooping high above my breastbone."
Literary critics debate the continuing significance of Carrigskeewaun (the actual location of his borrowed lakeside cottage) for a poet who commutes from home and roots in Belfast. One sees him as solving the confusion of national and cultural identity often attributed to the Ulster Protestant, another as gaining a new and distant perspective on North's tribal woes, a third as seeking "some kind of alternative life" to compensate for shortcomings of the real world.
Annual summer escape from the malaise of the North's marching season has been common to many of Belfast's middle-class families (taking over Achill, for example, a few days before the Twelfth). But the Longleys' visits, familial and solitary, have slowly increased throughout the year, open to the landscape and its wildlife in different lights and weathers (the October arrival of the whooper swans "with you wide awake/ In your nightdress at the erratic boulder/ Counting through binoculars . . .").
Longley has approached nature with increasing seriousness and love, storing up knowledge as exact as his images ("the stonechat's/Flirtatious tail and flinty scolding" . . . "a bumble bee on a thistle head/Suspended, neither feeding nor dying"). But his readiness "to go down on my knees, taking it all in" is part of a human empathy enriched by a zest for the Greek classics (as in the boisterous poem, 'The Group' in this collection) and profound affection for his friends.
Among them is David Cabot, zoologist, ornithologist and Michael Longley's host at Carrigskeewaun. He was a founder of the Irish Wildbird Conservancy (now BirdWatch Ireland) and was also, as the jacket of another new book reminds us, "a special environmental adviser to the Irish Prime Minister". He helped, in fact, to shape the green enthusiasms of the only Taoiseach - Charles Haughey - who ever gave a toss for the island's natural heritage.
The book, Irish Birds, is an appealingly handsome hardback that updates and improves upon an original paperback edition of almost 10 years ago. Designed now for the car or home, rather than anorak or rucksack, it describes and illustrates 167 of the birds of Ireland that people with a general interest are actually most likely to see.
Cabot groups them by the wider sort of habitat - parks and gardens, farmland and hedgerow, rocky and sandy coasts and so on - rather than by the usual field-guide classifications. He adds a good deal of information about behaviour, and uses recent figures in population trends. But his account of a changing landscape does not quite catch up with the recent impact of development - on hedgerows, in particular - or with the severe decline of curlew and lapwing in the agricultural North.
While many species of intensive farmland have continued to decline, others - such as the crow family - are flourishing: visitors "are surprised," writes Cabot, "at the number of 'black birds' which appear to be taking over the Irish countryside." Although we may well lose the corncrake, breeding buzzards are spreading year by year and the little egret has colonised the southern coasts. The next 10 years of climate change will certainly justify a further edition; meanwhile, this one will certainly earn its keep.
Snow Water is published by Cape (£8). Irish Birds is published by Collins (£15)