Search results for ""Author Bernard O'Donoghue""

This is the second Oxford poetry anthology which represents works of the Oxford poetry list.

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Poetry, arguably, has a greater range of conceptual meaning than perhaps any other term in English. At the most basic level everyone can recognise it--it is a kind of literature that uses special linguistic devices of organization and expression for aesthetic effect. However, far grander claims have been made for poetry than this--such as Shelley's that the poets 'are the unacknowledged legislators of the world', and that poetry is 'a higher truth'. In this Very Short Introduction, Bernard O'Donoghue provides a fascinating look at the many different forms of writing which have been called 'poetry'--from the Greeks to the present day. As well as questioning what poetry is, he asks what poetry is for, and considers contemporary debates on its value. Is there a universality to poetry? And does it have a duty of public utility and responsibility? ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

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Winner of the Whitbread Prize for Poetry, Bernard O'Donoghue's poems have long captivated readers with their lyricism, their grace and with what John Burnside has called their 'scrupulous honesty'. This judicious selection, made by the author himself, draws on twenty years of work and presents O'Donoghue at his most mesmeric: often recalling the rural Cork of his upbringing as seen against the exile of his adulthood, ever alive to the desire but impossibility of return.

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Composed during the fourteenth century in the English Midlands, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight describes the events that follow when a mysterious green-coloured knight rides into King Arthur's Camelot in deep mid-winter. The mighty knight presents a challenge to the court: he will allow himself to be struck by one blow, on the condition that he will be allowed to return the strike on the following New Year's Eve. Sir Gawain takes up the challenge, decapitating the stranger - only to see the Green Knight seize up his own severed head and ride away, leaving Gawain to seek him out and honour their pact. Blending Celtic myth and Christian faith, Gawain is among the greatest Middle English poems: a tale of magic, chivalry and seduction.

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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

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Geoffrey Chaucer is rightly regarded as the Father of English Literature. His observant wit, his narrative skill and characterization, his linguistic invention, have been a well from which the language's greatest writers have drawn: Shakespeare, Pope, Austen, Dickens among them. A courtier, a trade emissary and diplomat, he fought in the Hundred Years War and was captured and ransomed; his marriage into the family of John of Gaunt ensured his influence in political society. For more than a decade, he was engaged on his most famous work of all, The Canterbury Tales, until his death around 1400; there is no record of the precise date or the circumstances of his demise, despite vivid and colourful speculation.Bernard O'Donoghue is one of the country's leading poets and medievalists. His accessible new selection includes a linking commentary on the chosen texts, together with a comprehensive line-for-line glossary that makes this the most approachable and accessible introduction to Chaucer that readers can buy.

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The book brings together subtle and moving meditations on exile and belonging, travel and home, and honours many friends and loved ones along the way. In a series of poems that frequently recall the south-west Ireland of the author's childhood, Farmers Cross shows the author writing at his visionary and lyrical best.

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In 1940, a young girl is taken from her home in Eastern Poland to Arkhangelsk, Siberia; in 1942, she boards a train. Seventy years later, that journey is reimagined by her granddaughter, Zosia Kuczyńska. As Kuczyńska’s poems tell the story of her babcia, her maternal grandmother, coming to England, she confronts some of the big questions of art and history: how do you tell another person’s story without exploiting it? What’s at stake when we try make patterns out of the past, and can we ever leave those patterns behind? Kuczyńska’s poems are both richly narrative and sharply attentive to the complexities of home and culture. They capture human endurance through the redrawing of political maps, from ‘the heat of Easter in Tehran’ to the powdered eggs and stocking shortages of the London Blitz.

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Jane Draycott's translation of Pearl reissued as a Carcanet Classic. A Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. In a dream landscape radiant with jewels, a father sees his lost daughter on the far bank of a river: `my pearl, my girl’. One of the great treasures of the British Library, the fourteenth-century poem Pearl is a work of poetic brilliance; its account of loss and consolation has retained its force across six centuries. Jane Draycott in her new translation remakes the imaginative intensity of the original. This is, Bernard O’Donoghue says in his introduction, `an event of great significance and excitement’, an encounter between medieval tradition and an acclaimed modern poet.

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Comprehensive survey of the Middle English lyric, one of the most important forms of medieval literature. Winner of a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award The Middle English lyric occupies a place of considerable importance in the history of English literature. Here, for the first time in English, are found many features of formal and thematic importance: they include rhyme scheme, stanzaic form, the carol genre, love poetry in the manner of the troubadour poets, and devotional poems focusing on the love, suffering and compassion of Christ and theVirgin Mary. The essays in this volume aim to provide both background information on and new assessments of the lyric. By treating Middle English lyrics chapter by chapter according to their kinds - poems dealing with love, with religious devotion, with moral, political and popular themes, and those associated with preaching - it provides the awareness of their characteristic cultural contexts and literary modalities necessary for an informed critical reading. Full account is taken of the scholarship upon which our knowledge of these lyrics rests, especially the outstanding contributions of the last few decades and such recent insights as those of gender criticism. Also included are detailed discussions of the valuable information afforded by the widely varying manuscript contexts in which Middle English lyrics survive and of the diverse issues involved in editing these texts. Separate chapters are devotedto the carol, which came to prominence in the fifteenth century, and to Middle Scots lyrics which, at the end of the Middle English lyric tradition, present some sophisticated productions of an entirely new order. Contributors: Julia Boffey, Thomas G. Duncan, John Scattergood, Vincent Gillespie, Christiania Whitehead, Douglas Gray, Karl Reichl, Thorlac Turville-Petre, Alan J. Fletcher, Bernard O'Donoghue, Sarah Stanbury and Alasdair A. MacDonald. THOMAS G. DUNCAN is Honorary Senior Lecturer, School of English, University of St Andrews

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This anthology follows the OxfordPoets anthologies of 2000, 2001 and 2002. It introduces a number of new poets who are beginning to make their way. The collection celebrates the diversity of the Oxford list (since 1999 an imprint of Carcanet Press in association with the English Faculty of the University of Oxford). The editors are members of the OxfordPoets board. Bernard O'Donoghue, born in County Cork in 1945; teaches Mediaeval English at Wadham College, Oxford and has published four books of poems. David Constantine, an authority on Holderlin, is a poet and a freelance translator.

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