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.

May 2019: Charles I. Armstrong is a professor of English literature at the University of Agder, in Norway. Among his publications are Reframing Yeats: Genre, Allusion and History (Bloomsbury, 2013) and the co-edited volume The Legacy of the Good Friday Agreement: Politics, Culture and Art in Northern Ireland after 1998 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).