Description
Book SynopsisCaitríona O’Reilly’s poetry is remarkable for its precise observation of the natural world. Her second collection, The Sea Cabinet, broadens that clear-sighted vision in poems also haunted by history, consolidating the achievement of her prizewinning début volume, The Nowhere Birds. Her title-poem conjures the vanished world of the whaling industry, and serves as a starting-point for other acute meditations on natural and cultural obsolescence. Yet the habitual concerns of the lyric self are present too, in poems which enact the dilemmas and anxieties of the individual amidst a rapidly changing environment. The Sea Cabinet was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. Caitríona O’Reilly’s first collection The Nowhere Birds won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, given for the best book by any new Irish writer published in 2001. Her third collection Geis won the Irish Times Poetry Now Award 2016
Trade ReviewCaitríona O’Reilly’s poetry collection The Sea Cabinet really impresses with its intellectual and emotional range. Not an overtly lyrical poet, O’Reilly nonetheless manages to explore the private self at odds with an environment and culture now in permanent flux. Her sense of the trail left by history is absorbing and fresh. -- Mary O'Donnell * Sunday Independent (Books of the Year) *
Excitingly sophisticated…possessed of metaphysical eloquence and quietly meditative intelligence, from this most European of Irish poets. -- Eileen Battersby * The Irish Times (Books of the Year) *
This is a profoundly unconventional collection. It is not, to begin with, lyric verse. Rather, it is an exploration of disturbance and alienation; whose strikingly ornate, often historically derived imagery generates a sense of coalescence, of the irresistible thickening-up of experience… When she stands back, lettting the poem build a new myth around an objection of quotidian apprehension – a Heliotrope, an X-ray – O’Reilly can be among the best we have. -- Fiona Sampson * The Irish Times *
