Description
Book SynopsisWheel, as the title suggests, is full of revolving perspectives and throughout Michael O'Neill's beautifully modulated second collection, the poetry turns on an axis of opposites: self and others, here and there, childhood and middle-age, the present and the past. In the title-poem, an encounter with a tramp calls to mind the wheel of fortune; another poem depicts a 360° shot of a figure on a bridge; in yet another an adoption application prompts memories of circling a field.
Elsewhere, a boy's phantasmal arm brushes his ear as he bowls, the dead form a band of souls, a merry-go-round melts into a hoop of light, and the rings of a tree uprooted in a gale expose its age. The poems often open out on to imagined states and virtual realities, and occasionally glimpse a dimension beyond time's whirligig. Deft in its shifts of tone and formally skilful, Wheel is a powerful and affecting collection.
Table of ContentsPost-Mortem, Making a Will, Dawn, Cheverny , Leaves, God Talk, Sunday Morning, Adelphi Dreams, Angel, Halifax, Wheel , Stateless, Music in the Mirabell, Norfolk, Guilt, Aura, Camp, Images, Next DoorVersions, Idyll, Fall , Waiting, Void , Caught , Lost, Crush, Going Back, Looking On, Bengal Night, Non-Combatant, Lines, Dream Families, Adoption Hearing, Spell, Appearances, Exchange Visit, Hope, Stare, There, Corridor, Turneresque, The Half-Landing, Unspoken, The Line-Manager's Soliloquy, Moments, It, Popeye Village, Daypex, Probably Not, Gloss, Dawn, Bypass, Venetian Triptych 1. September 2. Precious Little 3. Calculus, Spinners, Infinity, Compass Needle, Blue, Toys for the Boys. Biographical note.
