An entertaining book about the controversial Jim Longley of Maine, who single-handedly upset both political parties to become the first Independent to be elected governor in modern times in the US.

1968 was an unprecedented year in terms of upheaval on numerous scales: political, military, economic, social, cultural. In the United States, perhaps no one was more undone by the events of 1968 than President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Kyle Longley leads his readers on a behind-the-scenes tour of what Johnson characterized as the 'year of a continuous nightmare'. Longley explores how LBJ perceived the most significant events of 1968, including the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr and Robert Kennedy, and the violent Democratic National Convention in Chicago. His responses to the crises were sometimes effective but often tragic, and LBJ's refusal to seek re-election underscores his recognition of the challenges facing the country in 1968. As much a biography of a single year as it is of LBJ, LBJ's 1968 vividly captures the tumult that dominated the headlines on a local and global level.

*AN IRISH TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR* 'I can't bear the thought of a world without Michael Longley, yet his poetry keeps hurtling towards that fact more and more urgently as it stretches in an unflinching way beyond comfort or certainty.' So wrote Maria Johnston, reviewing Longley's previous book Angel Hill. Yet The Candlelight Master does not only face into shadows. The title poem sums up the chiaroscuro of this collection, named after a mysterious Baroque painter. Other poems about painters - Matisse, Bonnard - imply that age makes the quest for artistic perfection all the more vital. A poem addressed to the eighth-century Japanese poet, Otomo Yakamochi, says: 'We gaze on our soul-landscapes / More intensely with every year.' The soul-landscape of The Candlelight Master is often a landscape of memory. But if Longley looks back over formative experiences, and over the forms he has given them, he channels memory into freshly fluid structures. His new poems about war and the Holocaust speak to our own dark times. Translation brings dead poets up to date too. The bawdy of Catullus becomes Scots 'Hochmagandy'. Yakamochi and the lyric poets of Ancient Greece find themselves at home in Longley's Carrigskeewaun.

William Preston Longley (1851-1878) went on a murderous rampage over the last few years of his life. Once he was arrested in 1877, and subsequently sentenced to hang, his name became known statewide as an outlaw and a murderer. Longley created and reveled in his self-centered image as a fearsome, deadly gunfighter. In truth, Longley was not the daring figure that he attempted to paint.

Best remembered as the father of Vice President Al Gore, Albert Gore, Sr., worked tirelessly in politics himself, a Democratic congressman and senator from 1939 to 1971 and a representative of southern liberalism and American reformism. In the first comprehensive biography of Gore, Kyle Longley has produced an incisive portrait of a significant American political leader and an arresting narrative of the shaping of a southern and American political tradition. His research includes archival sources from across the country as well as interviews with Gore’s colleagues, friends, and family. Longley describes how the native of Possum Hollow, Tennessee, became known during his political career as a maverick, a man who, according to one journalist, would “rock almost anybody’s boat.” For his actions, Gore often paid a heavy price, personally and professionally. Overshadowed by others in Congress such as Lyndon Johnson, J. William Fulbright, Richard Russell, and Barry Goldwater, Gore nonetheless played a major role on the important issues of taxes, the Interstate Highway system, civil rights, nuclear power and arms control, and the Vietnam War. Longley situates Gore as part of a generation of politicians who matured on the messages of William Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt. In the South, Gore belonged to a staunch group of liberals who battled traditional conservative forces, often within their own party. He and others such as Estes Kefauver, Frank Porter Graham, and Ralph Yarborough set the stage for subsequent generations, including that of Jimmy Carter and Jim Sasser, and later Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Jr., and John Edwards. From his career shines one encapsulating moment in 1952: squared off on the floor of the Senate against Strom Thurmond, who wanted Gore to sign the “Southern Manifesto” declaring southern resistance to desegregation, Gore responded simply, classically, “Hell no.”

The poems in this volume vary widely in length, subject, and setting (from Mayo, to Tuscany, to Japan). With a Zen-like grace, even the briefest poems hurdle logical gaps and sidestep reason to get to truths. The poet's acute vision is directed outward, and we know him only through the light he casts on the world's things as he holds them in loving, elegiac frames. Winner of the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry, 2001; Winner of the T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize, 2001; Winner of the Hawthornden Prize, 2000.

Beginning in 1924, Proceedings are incorporated into the Apr. no.