Description
In this collection, Hugh O’Donnell casts a meditative eye across a world in distress. With so much at stake, he traces the seeds of violence from early trauma to what happens on the street; small scale, or large, simply offer complementary takes on our shifting reality. On the other hand, wonder, imagination and play refuse to be undone by the unanswerable ‘point of it all’. The collection is wide ranging, moving easily from gangland killings to the world of drugs, from war to immigration, identity and loss of tenure; from considerations of language, art, religion, illness and death to our hope invested in the natural world. Hugh O’Donnell has a light touch and a skill for finding the metaphor that opens the space before us, skirting any simple credo beyond continually re-negotiating the collection’s tentative position as a reluctance to complain.
Hugh O’Donnell lives in Dublin’s inner city and that background is never far from his concerns. This is his fourth collection, his second with Salmon. His previous collections, ‘Planting A Mouth’ and ‘No Place Like It’ were published by Doghouse (Tralee). In a different vein, two books of reflective prose poems, ‘Songs for the Slow Lane’ and ‘Time to Call Home’ have endeavored to draw attention to what we miss when we are out of step with ourselves and with the natural world.