Here Nor There (Chatto poetry) Book

Award-winning author of Gunpowder, Bernard O'Donoghue is a dignified, richly humane poet, who has established a reputation for his lyrical and elegiac reflections on his rural upbringing in County Cork. His third collection, Here Nor There, sustains and extends that tone of quiet, mournful recollection in a powerful series of poems on characters and places from his youth--as well as elegies for friends and other poets. Haunted by a sense of belonging neither to Ireland nor to England--where he now lives, writes and teaches-- O'Donoghue explores what it means to be "outcast / Alike from the one shore and the other" (Nechtan). Uncovering the complex, often discomforting, edge of that exclusion in poems such as "Command of English" and "Unknownst to the People", O'Donoghue's reflections show a sense of palpable unhappiness and bitter memories, but are nonetheless informed by a "will to go on" (Dachyroma). Admitting into this sense of human frailty poems on love, death and hubris, O'Donoghue refines his many themes through a remarkable, often touching, style of storytelling which proclaims why, for him, being "Neither here nor there" is "therefore home" ("Westering Home"). --David MarriottRead More