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Caitríona O’Reilly’s first collection The Nowhere Birds won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and introduced a new writer of remarkable maturity and narrative power. The book’s holding pattern is set by questions of location and flight, beginning with views of childhood and adolescence, then moving outwards in poems of daringly imaginative range-finding. Whether describing a derelict harbour, an Alpine sky, Renaissance statuary or an octopus, O'Reilly manages to etch her images into memory with lapidary skilfulness. Such moments of imagistic stillness interact with a noisier world of human relations, yet the drive of her poems is towards lyric release and detachment. Above and beyond its wealth of detail and cosmopolitan bustle, The Nowhere Birds honours its title with an acute awareness of what goes on at the fringes of experience.
Price: $16.95
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Imprint: Bloodaxe Books
Publication Date:
26 April 2001
ISBN: 9781852245603
Format: Paperback
Caitríona O'Reilly was born in Dublin in 1973, grew up in Wicklow and Dublin, and now lives in Lincoln. She studied archaeology and English at Trinity College Dublin, where she wrote a doctoral thesis on American literature; she has also held the Harper-Wood Studentship from St John's College, Cambridge. Her first collection The Nowhere Birds was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2001, and won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2002 (given to the best new book by any Irish writer). Her second collection, The Sea Cabinet (Bloodaxe Books, 2006), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award in 2007. Her third collection, Geis (Bloodaxe Books, UK; Wake Forest University Press, USA, 2015), won the Irish Times Poetry Now Award 2016 and was shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize in association with Listowel Writers' Week. It is also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She is a freelance writer and critic, has written for BBC Radio 4, translated from the Galician of María do Cebreiro, and published some fiction. She has collaborated with artist Isabel Nolan, edited several issues of Poetry Ireland Review, and was a contributing editor of the Irish poetry journal Metre.