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Dennis O'Driscoll (1954 - 2012)

  • About
  • Reviews
  • Awards
  • Dennis O’Driscoll (1954–2012) was born in Thurles, Co. Tipperary. Apart from nine collections of poetry, books published during his lifetime included a selection of essays and reviews, Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams (2001), two collections of literary quotations and Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (2008). Among his awards were a Lannan Literary Award in 1999, the 2005 E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the 2006 O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry from the Center for Irish Studies (Minnesota). A member of Aosdána, the Irish academy of artists, he worked for almost forty years in Ireland’s Revenue and Customs service. He died on Christmas Eve, 2012.

    A second collection of his essays, The Outnumbered Poet, was published by Gallery Press in 2013. His selection from the works of Michael Hamburger, A Michael Hamburger Reader, will be published by Anvil in 2015.

    'Carcanet has done a great job in collating work from his various collections with some revised and new poems... O'Driscoll's work should be read and re-read, as a sort of 'life' of a poet and scholar who worked outside academe and literary theory, deep in the bowels of the everyday, where flesh-and-blood experiences strive to make their own poetry.'
    John Wakeman, Books Ireland
      ''To rinse the world in rose water before you write is to bear false witness''. This is the challenge that O'Driscoll took on board - to face the workaday world we might have thought we'd risen above. He, and his discerning overview, are much missed. His Collected Poems are welcomed.'
    Dundee University Review of the Arts
       'His voice is one of the most distinctive of his generation.'
    John McAuliffe, The Irish Times
        'It is as a poet of European temperament, and stature, that O'Driscoll demands to be judged. His terrain is, in effect, without borders: mordant, open, sharp, generous, and sad.'
    George Szirtes, Guardian
        'It takes a special genius to see the real and important lurking in the mundanely routine - O'Driscoll, the Irish Larkin, does. This most astute of poets juxtaposes the soul of the artist with the exactness of the anthropologist; the result is work of meditative intelligence, humour and forgiving humanity.'
    Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times
    Awards won by Dennis O'Driscoll (1954 - 2012) Short-listed, 2001 Irish Times Literary Prize,Irish Poetry (Weather Permitting) Winner, 2013 Irish Times Literary Prize,Irish Poetry (Dear Life) Winner, 2013 Irish Times Literary Prize,Irish Poetry (Dear Life)
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