"Ours was a language of flowers": Deathscape and Vegetal Poetics in the Poetry of Michael Longley.

This article centers around the works of the leading Irish poet Michael Longley (1939-2025) and examines the complex interplay between his deathscape and sustained attention to vegetal life. Drawing on critical plant studies, particularly Michael Marder's Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, this essay argues that Longley's contemplation, imagination, and representation of death are deeply shaped by his ongoing engagement with plant life. Rather than serving merely as a convenient metaphor or a passive backdrop, the vegetal world in Longley's poetry fosters a kind of vegetal poetics that emphasizes vegetal alterity, non-identical thinking, and humanplant enanglement. In Longley's works, plant life emerges as an active and creative participant in the deathscape, prompting a rethinking of the relationship between self, place, and environment both within the Northern Irish context and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]