Exploring the universal themes of exile, love, sex, death, Irish poet John O’Donnell’s third collection is alive to the present and the past, the poems focused on the intimate particular: a mother’s panic on a beach; the stench of an industrial school; a slave-trader’s one good eye. Armed with a lightness of touch, these poems are not afraid of the darker regions of our experiences.
John O’Donnell was born in 1960. His work has appeared in newspapers and journals in Ireland, the UK, the US and Australia, and has been broadcast on local and national radio. He won the Hennessy / Sunday Tribune New Irish Writing Award for Poetry in 1998, and in 2001 The Ireland Fund’s Listowel Writers’ Week Prizes for Best Individual Poem and Best Short Collection. Some Other Country, his first collection, appeared in 2002 and also in 2002 he won the SeaCat irish National Poetry Prize. His most recent collection of poems is Icarus Sees His Father Fly, which appeared from Dedalus in 2004.