Dennis O'Driscoll lends his transformative vision to everyday "bread and butter" routines and the insidious forces that imperil them. From the entertaining mixture of shorter poems which opens his eighth collection, he branches out with "Skywriting",...

The poems in Mary O'Malley's new collection focus on legal separation: of Northern from Southern Ireland, of written Irish from its original script, of husband from wife. The book explores a season in hell when the verities vanish, the love we live b...

Charles Olson (1910-1970) believed that poetry exists in an "open field" through which the poet transmits energy to the receptive reader. Olson's influence on the development of British and American poetry through his writing and teaching is immense....

Frank O'Hara (1926-1966) is among the most delightful and radical poets of the twentieth century. He is celebrated for his apparently unpremeditated poems, autobiographical and immediate ("any time, any place"). This is not the whole O'Hara: he may h...

Dennis O'Driscoll is among the finest and most popular poets of his generation. "New and Selected Poems" shows him to be a poet of humanity and wit whose observant, rhythmically supple poetry is attuned to the tragedies and comedies of contemporary l...

George Oppen's "New Collected Poems" gathers all of the poet's books published in his lifetime (1908-1984). It adds previously uncollected poems and a selection of his unpublished work. One of America's most vigorous modernists, he was a member of th...

Five booklets that Ovid first penned now are three; he preferred to emend. So if we don't please you, at least we can ease you presenting two less to offend. Ovid (c. 43 BC-AD17), a daring, original and passionate poet, has been an enduring influenc...

"...a remarkable new poetry – both modest and monumental, with something basically usable about it – not only for poets in search of a voice of their own but for the reader who turns to poetry as a last resort in trying to juggle the contradictory co...

"Exemplary Damages" is as fine and varied a collection as its five predecessors. It captures contemporary attitudes towards life, love and God with unfaltering accuracy in styles which range from the richly sensuous to the mercilessly mordant. Whethe...

Mary O'Malley is a natural musician. Her poetry alludes to music – the music of Ireland, the Iberian peninsula, the America of jazz and spiritual – and shares forms with it. Music is spiritual and political at the same time. Her themes embrace the ch...