By John O'Donnell

Sunlight: New and Selected Poems

John O’Donnell’s Sunlight: New and Selected Poems draws on his three previous collections, adding a number of new poems which, among other things, record the loss of the poet’s mother in some of his most moving poems to date.

Description

“Love, loss, memory, history, place are familiar preoccupations in John O’Donnell’s work; and, though poetry’s subject matter may be similar, a unique voice explores these themes in unique ways. The poems take us to very different places: Shakespeare in Ireland, the Holocaust, pioneering in Oregon, a grandmother’s Alzheimer’s. Here is a poet who searches for truth, and whether O’Donnell is remembering “me, surly in a sleeping-bag, fifteen” or the Omagh atrocity, the voice is always direct and honest, while capturing the close-up and personal with a wonderful fluency. O’Donnell’s poetry explores the steady and steadying presence of love within a family context but it also gives us the bigger picture, pictures of injustice, turmoil, ‘the unfathomable’ and what O’Donnell calls ‘a deep darker than ink’.  Turn to these enriching and engaging poems in Sunlight: New and Selected Poems; the poems will turn to you. And you will be rewarded.”
—Niall MacMonagle, from the Introduction


The tone is often moral and high-minded but never didactic or sanctimonious. O’Donnell’s ability to make connections with the lessons of history makes this poetry memorable.
— Mary O’Donnell, Poetry Ireland Review

O’Donnell’s work is frequently concerned with the “also-rans”, the loved others, the unnoticed, the lost; and the open, almost jaunty tone of many of these poems belies their serious intent, a vision of the world often tinged with tragedy, as in the powerful The Breaststroke among his newer poems, or Kola’s Shop from his 2002 collection, Some Other Country, which describes the plight of an African immigrant subject to racist attacks. One of the subtler pleasures of this book is the skill with which O’Donnell handles the technical aspects of his work, the adroit but unshowy way in which meter and phrasing are managed.
— Caitríona O’Reilly, The Irish Times


 The Shipping Forecast

for my father

Tied up at the pier in darkened harbour
the two of us below, the cabin’s amber
light; me surly in a sleeping-bag, fifteen,
and you, past midnight, calmly tuning in
to the Shipping Forecast, long wave’s
crackle, hiss, until you find the voice.
What’s next for us: rain or fair? There are
warnings of gales in Rockall and Finisterre.
So near now, just this teak bulkhead
between us, and yet so apart, battened
hatches as another low approaches, the high
over the Azores as distant as a man is from a boy.
I think of my own boat one day, the deep.
Beside me the sea snores, turns over in its sleep.

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Product Detail

  • ISBN: : 9781910251317
  • Size: : 140 x 216 mm
  • Pages: : 152
  • Published: : May 2018

About The Author

Author

John O'Donnell was born in 1960. He has published three previous collections of poems, Some Other Country (2002), Icarus Sees His Father Fly (Dedalus Press, 2004) and On Water (Dedalus Press, 2014). Sunlight: New and Selected Poems, with an introduction by Niall MacMonagle, is published by Dedalus Press in 2018. His awards include the Hennessy Award for Poetry, the Ireland Funds Prize, and the SeaCat National Poetry Prize. As a fiction writer his work has appeared widely in recent years, and in 2013 he received the Hennessy Award for Fiction. A senior counsel, he lives and works in Dublin. He has been a member of the Board of Poetry Ireland, among other institutions, and has served on the Board of The Arts Council.