Book description
Bernard O'Donoghue's magnificent fourth collection of poetry explores
its title in a series of beautifully wrought poems whose simple
elegance belie their complexity. There are moving elegies for people
the poet has outlived. There are poems too about living outside the
poet's original environment and the inclination to return there for
stories and feelings: the MacNeicean 'tourist in his own country',
perpetually restive and homesick.
Ireland for O'Donoghue is both more real than anywhere else and
strangely ghostly - a country where the past is preserved but also
where a rural generation is dying out. A place, a moment, a person -
each poem reaches out from the particular to a luminous understanding
of the uncertainties of life.
Bernard O'Donoghue was born in Cullen, Co. Cork in 1945. He is a
Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, where he teaches Medieval English.
Chatto have published his previous collections, including
The Weakness
(1991),
Gunpowder
(winner of the 1995 Whitbread Award for Poetry),
Here Nor There
(1999) which was a Poetry Book Society Choice title; and
Farmer's Cross
(2011). An edition of his
Selected Poems
was published by Chatto in 2008.
