The Anchorage

(Paperback, Main)

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Poetry of how we shape what is lost or past, and how it shapes us.

Bernard O'Donoghue investigates the idea of anchorage as a place we build for ourselves out of memory and story. The Ireland of his youth is rich in colour and precise in detail, and while he acknowledges the power of the past, he also brings it into question: 'I wish I'd never started on this story;/It may have been a dream, or maybe not . . .' O'Donoghue's informal, even playful tone is that of a poet disarming themselves as well as their reader. He is neither plaintive nor nostalgic but confronts the possibility that what you are most attached to can be, in the end, what ties you down. The poems also enact the reluctance to return that arises out of a fear of finding yourself locked out.

Reviews

"O'Donoghue's poems are an object lesson in how to write poetry that matters." - PN Review

"The poignancy of O'Donoghue's migratory imagination is . . . the perfect travelling companion." - TLS

"Compelling and simple diction . . . full of gentle, sometimes undetectable flashes of humour." - London Magazine

"As with everything O'Donoghue writes, the more you look, the more you see." - Scotsman

Author Bio

Bernard O'Donoghue was born in Cullen, Co Cork in 1945. He is an Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College, where he taught Medieval English and Modern Irish Poetry. He has published six collections of poetry, including Gunpowder, winner of the 1995 Whitbread Prize for Poetry, and The Seasons of Cullen Church, shortlisted for the 2016 T. S. Eliot Prize. His Selected Poems was published by Faber in 2008. He has published a verse translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Penguin Classics, 2006), and is currently translating Piers Plowman for Faber.