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Scoop.it!
by Dennis O’DriscollBy landslide vote 
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Scoop.it!
It must have been in the early 1980s that I first met Dennis O’Driscoll, possibly after he published his first poetry collection, Kist (1982), and before the follow-up collection, Hidden Extras (1987). Dennis contributed to a review I was editing in Galway called Krino. The review was launched ‑ by Stephen Rea ‑ in Buswell’s Hotel in Dublin and I have a recollection of meeting him there as well. - See more at: http://www.drb.ie/essays/the-listener#sthash.7yRvXBSj.dpuf
Scoop.it!
A skinny, gummy old guy selling bric-a-brac splayed out upon sagging porta-tables along a boarded-up stretch of the East Village. He sits to one side overseeing, half-sunk into a well-frayed leather seat, chewing nothing but spittle and air, chewing and watching and ruminating. He has been hawker and watcher and ruminator here a long time, inhaling all the passing instants on this ever-passing street, instants gone between the in-breath and the out-breath, unnoticed by anyone but him. He is the stillness in the rush, the painter on the banks, the maestro with the steady point of view from which to frame perspectives and formulate truths. Everyone else on the street is in a constant in-between, precisely nowhere, attending inner anxieties, oncoming necessities, confined to their immediate personal zone, learning only how to get from A to B on time and in the straightest line, paying little attention to the content of their journey.
Scoop.it!
POETRY BOOK SOCIETY SPECIAL COMMENDATION Among other characteristics Seamus Heaney treasured Dennis O’Driscoll’s ‘acuity as a critic’. The Outnumbered Poet, an extensive selection of Dennis O’ Driscoll’s prose writings — critical, biographical and autobiographical — succeeds his much-praised Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams (The Gallery Press, 2001). Opening on a personal note, it includes astute and incisive essays and reviews, encompassing poets as diverse as Anna Kamienska and Billy Collins, and surveying the work of major practitioners such as R S Thomas, Czeslaw Milosz and Yehuda Amichai. There are perceptive readings of the poetry with vivid and telling accounts of meetings with the poets themselves. Drawing on his encyclopaedic knowledge of the Nobel laureate’s oeuvre, the book also offers in-depth considerations of Seamus Heaney’s writings, and — among several previously unpublished essays — a ground-breaking overview of the life and poetry of Ireland’s poète maudit, Michael Hartnett. - See more at: http://www.gallerypress.com/new-titles-2013/#!/~/product/category=4581476&id=30061803
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Scoop.it!
The ever magnanimous writer-critic Dennis O'Driscoll was overseer of the global poetry village, says Aingeal Clare
Scoop.it!
The Irish poet died on Christmas Eve 2012. He would have been 60 on New Years Day 2014. It thus feels appropriate today, on the last day of 2013 and the eve of the day of the poet's birth, to share...
Scoop.it!
A new collection of essays and poems celebrates poet and editor Peter Fallon. In his contribution, the late Dennis O’Driscoll describes the man who was his ‘first poet’
Meet Patel's curator insight,
November 21, 2013 10:55 AM
I want you to read this because this is about poetry and how did Peter Fallon bought to Irish. This is something you would like to know.
Scoop.it!
Celebration was tinged with a shared sadness at the loss of an original voice
A poignant period for Irish poetry continued in Dún Laoghaire on Saturday as this year’s Dlr Irish Times Poetry Now award, won by Dennis O’Driscoll’s final collection, Dear Life, was presented to his widow, poet Julie O’Callaghan. In receiving it, she read the words of Czech poet Miroslav Holub’s Ode to Joy: “Like caryatids/our uplifted arms/hold up time’s granite load/and defeated/we shall always win.” Victory was not, however, all that important; a sense of loss presided and O’Driscoll’s collection had been dominated by mortality and musings on the randomness of life, its sneaky haste. “The tally of years/added up so rapidly/it appeared I had/been short-changed,/ tricked by sleight/of hand, fallen victim/to false bookkeeping.” (From Time Enough.)
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