Micheal O'Siadhail – författare

The essential selected works of Ireland's leading poet, Micheal O'SiadhailWith an illustrious literary career that has spanned over fifty years, renowned poet Micheal O'Siadhail has cemented his place on the international stage. From his debut collection, The Leap Year (1978), to his latest collection, Desire (2023), O'Siadhail captures evolving struggles with love, faith, and humanity. Here, spanning the entirety of his outstanding career, is the essence of his masterful body of work.The Essential Poems voyages through traditional and innovative poetic forms, investigating love and passion, joy and loss, world-shaping events and personal experiences. O'Siadhail sounds the depths of meaning and evokes wonder, surprise, anguish, and delight. A lyrical meditation on the relationships between humanity and nature, despair and faith, and the richness of courage in the acts of healing completes what proves to be this unforgettable and necessary collection of the inimitable Irish poet.

The Five Quintets is both poetry and cultural history. It offers a sustained reflection on modernity - people and movements - in poetic meter. Just as Dante, in his Divine Comedy, summed up the Middle Ages on the cusp of modernity, The Five Quintets takes stock of a late modern world on the cusp of the first-ever global century.Celebrated Irish poet Micheal O'Siadhail structures his Quintets to echo the Comedy. Where Dante had a tripartite structure ( Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso), O'Siadhail has a five-part structure, with each quintet devoted to a discipline - the arts; economics; politics; science; and philosophy and theology. Each quintet is also marked by a different form: sonnets interspersed by haikus (""saikus""), iambic pentameter, terza rima, and two other invented forms.The Five Quintets captivates even as it instructs, exploring the ever-changing flow of ideas and the individuals whose contributions elicited change and reflected their times. The artists, economists, politicians, scientists, and philosophers O'Siadhail features lived complex lives, often full of contradictions. Others, though deeply rooted in their context, transcended their time and place and pointed beyond themselves - even to us and to a time after modernity's reign.The ancient Horace commended literature that delivered ""profit with delight."" In The Five Quintets, Micheal O'Siadhail has done just that: he delights us in the present with his artistry, even as he reveals hidden treasures of our past and compels us toward the future.

For twenty years, celebrated poet Micheal O'Siadhail's beloved wife, Bríd, suffered from Parkinson's disease. O'Siadhail's verses explore the ordinary triumph of human fidelity and sound the depths of parting through a 150-sonnet sequence in which love faces wasting illness and the specter of death. There is tenderness, intensity, and gratitude—which will resonate with all who know both love and loss.

Celebrated poet Micheal O'Siadhail knows desire, love, trust, and wonder. He also intimately knows sorrow, suffering, tragedy, and loss. His life and his poetry have always yearned for meaning and virtue despite, and in the midst of, life's pain. This collection of poems, spanning four decades and drawing upon thirteen smaller collections, works both head and heart toward a mature and seasoned wisdom. The poems are not only richly personal, plumbing the depths of marriage, friendship, vocation, and grief, but they also engage with what matters most in culture and societyâmusic, language, city life, and the dynamics of history. O'Siadhail's roots may be deeply Irish, but his poetry speaks for and to all.

Celebrated poet Micheal O'Siadhail knows desire, love, trust, and wonder. He also intimately knows sorrow, suffering, tragedy, and loss. His life and his poetry have always yearned for meaning and virtue despite, and in the midst of, life's pain. This collection of poems, spanning four decades and drawing upon thirteen smaller collections, works both head and heart toward a mature and seasoned wisdom. The poems are not only richly personal, plumbing the depths of marriage, friendship, vocation, and grief, but they also engage with what matters most in culture and societyâmusic, language, city life, and the dynamics of history. O'Siadhail's roots may be deeply Irish, but his poetry speaks for and to all.

Testament is an imaginative improvisation on the Bible that engages with the intensities, the ups and downs, of existence in our complex and fragmented world.Psalter, the first part, comprises 150 psalm-like poems that sound the depths and heights of life lived in the presence of God. Here, shaped into powerful, accessible poetry, is the wisdom of a mature and practical faith that knows love, grief, doubt, fear, disappointment, and overwhelming delight and joy. Micheal O’Siadhail stretches heart, mind, and imagination to open up profound questions of God, suffering and aging, truth and trust, freedom and surprise, desire and love. There are passionate exchanges with God and daring leaps of insight. Through them all runs a gripping conversational relationship expressed in praise, thanks, lament, and distilled wisdom, embracing a dazzling variety of forms and rhythms.Gospel, the second part, retells in poetry stories from the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The emphasis is on the plain sense of the stories, newly imagined. We are invited to reread them, to discover insights and nuances, angles and depths, and above all to encounter afresh the familiar yet endlessly mysterious central character—Jesus. The world’s bestselling book shows yet again its capacity to excite and inspire.O’Siadhail’s acclaimed The Five Quintets engaged with the ways in which the arts, economics, politics, the sciences, philosophy, and theology have shaped our twenty-first-century world. Here in Testament is an imaginative faith and wise spirituality that can inspire day-to-day living in that world, revealed through the inner life and penetrating discernment of a great poet.

Critically acclaimed and award-winning poet Micheal O'Siadhail's Desire is a quartet of poems which addresses the pressing global concerns of our times. He describes the devastating effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, how it spread worldwide, paralyzing our society and instilling daily fear of death, particularly in older people. Hospitals were unable to cope, restaurants and businesses were closing, workers were laid off, schools and universities taught remotely, and few weddings or funerals could take place throughout a pandemic which he sees as ultimately reflecting our relationship to the damaged environment and to climate change. The current ecological crisis is rooted in new reckless patterns of rapacity which threaten our habitat as our flawed stewardship has led to global warming, heatwaves, raging fires, and hurricanes. Still, we fail to curb our greed. Our need for comfort, convenience, and instant communication on the internet, which began as an idealistic dream of making knowledge universal, has resulted in an overconsumption that further harms our planet, a consumerism driven by algorithms and internet surveillance. It is time to regain a more modest perspective on our part in the natural world and learn again to be better forebears for the generations to come, responsible stewards of the earth we share. A greater sense of our role as humble, trusted custodians can free us for wonder and praise and allow us to re-find sources of meaning worthy of life-enhancing desires. O'Siadhail affirms with realism, imagination, and inspiring wisdom how our human desires and longings can open up ways through our unprecedented global challenges.

'How love is all when all is said and done' is at the heart of this distillation of a lifetime's experience into a personal 'patchwork of wisdom' shared across the generations with a grandson. The love relates to the whole of life, and the poet ranges through marriage and friendship, literature, music and art, justice and power, vocation and career, the dynamics of grandfather-grandson and father-son relationships, grief and death, and 'celebration's sweet excess'.O'Siadhail has dealt with these before at length in his major works, such as Love Life, The Five Quintets, and Desire, but here they all come together, concentrated into a moving, intimate address to 22-year old Eoghan, a grandson sensitively imagined as someone representing the rising generation. Eoghan's life--past, present, and especially future--is the springboard for a week, morning and afternoon, of deep sharing. Each day has its own themes, resonating with the day's name in a range of languages. Love is the golden thread through the week, with trust, infinitely precious and always vulnerable, woven in throughout as the core essential if love is to be mutual. The days of sharing are preceded both by O'Siadhail's personal prose Foreword and by a poetic Prologue, and followed by an Epilogue, and the form throughout is superbly crafted in Dantean terza rima, rhyming and rhythmic. This is a rare gem of profound, accessible, many-hued wisdom.

For twenty years Micheal O'Siadhail's beloved wife, Brid, suffered from Parkinson's disease. These love poems chronicle the last two years of her life, her death and his grief. In Love Life, now available again in his Collected Poems, he told their story of over three decades of marriage. In this sonnet sequence their love faces illness and death and sounds the depths of parting. There is a tenderness, intensity and gratitude which will resonate with those who know both love and loss.