Derek Mahon and Michael Longley have been publishing verse since the mid- 1960s. Both born in Belfast (Longley in 1939, Mahon in 1941), educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution (or 'Inst', as it is known) and at Trinity College, Dublin (where Longley read classics and Mahon French, English and philosophy), they emerged as poets in a period marked both by a remarkable growth in artistic and literary activity in a province long regarded as inimical to the arts, and by the stirring of political energies in Northern Ireland that inaugurated decades of violence and radical change. Their careers as poets display similarities and differences as they have responded to lives lived in a period when the status of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom has been in constant question. Michael Longley has lived in Belfast since the 1960s, spending summers in Co Mayo. In the same period Mahon has lived in London, Dublin and New York with sojourns in France and Italy, having spent only a brief period in Belfast after graduation. The historical and personal experience with which their work engages, however, is certainly related (whatever their differing career trajectories) to the political crisis of a period in which the relationship between Britain and Ireland has been profoundly affected by the Northern Irish problem. How they both relate imaginatively to the North, to Ireland and the rest of the world in such a period, when violence was endemic, takes the critic to central aspects of their work.