'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.

Michael Longley’s new collection takes its title from Dylan Thomas—“for the sake of the souls of the slain birds sailing.” The Slain Birds encompasses souls, slayings, and many birds, both dead and alive. The first poem laments a tawny owl killed by a car. That owl reappears later in “Totem,” which represents the book itself as “a star-surrounded totem pole/ With carvings of all the creatures.” “Slain birds” exemplify our impact on the creatures and the planet. But, in this book’s cosmic ecological scheme, birds are...