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.