I hadn’t read
the poetry of Bernard
O’Donoghue before his most recent collection, The
Seasons of Cullen Church. And yet, reading these poems, it seemed that
I’d been reading him all of my life.
The poems O’Donoghue
includes are poems of reflection and revisiting. No, you can’t go home again,
but you can consider home in memory, and a life in memory, and understand what
was important then is less so now, and what is important now was barely
discernible then.
The Seasons of Cullen Church is a consideration of a life.
What does it
mean for a grandfather to die at a young age, before his grandchildren will
ever know him except by story and the memories of others? Or why did that copy
of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary
smell like cigarette smoke? Or remembering the insemination of dairy cows? Or
seeing the nameplate on the school you attended? Or perhaps what it’s like to
be traveling and arriving in an unfamiliar town?
To continue
reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak
Poetry.
Photograph: Bernard O'Donoghue at Oxford University.
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