The Seasons of Cullen Church

Review O'Donoghue's poems are an object lesson in how to write poetry that matters. The new collection confirms him as one of the most lyrical, amused, tragic and serious poets currently writing in English. -- Maitreyabandhu ― PN Review The poignancy of O'Donoghue's migratory imagination is . . . the perfect travelling companion. -- Kelly Grovier ― TLS As with everything O'Donoghue writes, the more you look, the more you see. -- Roger Cox ― Scotsman Many of the book's character-driven poems are fruitfully complicated, both by an explicit questioning of the narrative in view and its contemporary validity. -- Karen McCarthy Woolf ― Poetry Review Compelling and simple diction . . . full of gentle, sometimes undetectable flashes of humour. -- Alice Troy-Donovan ― London Magazine Product Description Shortlisted for the 2016 T. S. Eliot Prize, this new collection of expert lyric poems from Whitbread Poetry Award winner Bernard O'Donoghue movingly animates the scenery and characters of his childhood in County Cork. The mythologies of family are here: the relative who maybe emigrated to America to be 'set upon at his arrival / for the few pounds sewn inside his coat'; the memory of 'Barty, a hopeless speller', caned so hard he dances; the big top come to the town park; the stolen apples raided from the orchard near the old school. Here too are the collective myths, the groundwater of older texts - Virgil's Aeneid, the Riddles of the Exeter Book, Dante's Purgatorio, the lives of the ancients and the gods - all of which in O'Donoghue's dexterous and discerning care reach forward from their long-ago origins to echo down our own lives. Many of these poems speak in elegy: for Connolly's Bookshop - closed down and mourned - or for lost friends; for the nostalgic places to which one cannot return, the field-corners and long roads of the deep past: 'So wistful is the recognition now / of the places that I hardly noted'. The stunning title piece, and the deft and poignant poems that make up this collection, will confirm O'Donoghue's place as one of the most approachable and agile voices in contemporary Irish and British poetry. 'I'm fascinated by O'Donoghue's wry vision, his infinitely gentle manner of displacing our more predictable reactions to things as they are so that we glimpse their underlying tragedy.' Tom Paulin Book Description A collection of expert lyric poems from Bernard O'Donoghue, which movingly animates the characters of his childhood in County Cork - now in paperback. About the Author Bernard O'Donoghue was born in Cullen, Co Cork in 1945. He is an Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College, where he taught Medieval English and Modern Irish Poetry. He has published six collections of poetry, including Gunpowder, winner of the 1995 Whitbread Prize for Poetry, and The Seasons of Cullen Church, shortlisted for the 2016 T. S. Eliot Prize. His Selected Poems was published by Faber in 2008. He has published a verse translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Penguin Classics, 2006), and is currently translating Piers Plowman for Faber.