Product Description

O'Reilly's 'The Nowhere Birds' introduces a young writer of remarkable maturity and narrative power. The book's holding pattern is set by questions of location and flight, beginning with views of childhood and adolescence, then moving outwards in poems of daring imaginative range-finding.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #417809 in Books
• Published on: 2001-04-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 63 pages

About the Author
Caitriona O'Reilly was born in Dublin in 1973, and lives in Wicklow. She studied at Trinity College Dublin, where she wrote a doctoral thesis on American literature. her poems, reviews and critical essays have appeared in many magazines. In 1999, on the strength of an earlier draft of this book, she recieved a majour Litrature Bursery from the Arts Counsil of Irland. The Nowhere Birds is her first collection.

Customer Reviews

exceptional debut
The Nowhere Birds has already been acclaimed by Irish Times as the best debut collection by an Irish poet since Paul Muldoon's New Weather, so it probably doesn't need my endorsement, but here it is anyway: this is a really enjoyable book. The Nowhere Birds of O'Reilly's title come from a Louis MacNeice poem, and she shares something of that Northern Irish poet's verbal control, punchy wit and ability to move from sharp social observation to a darker and altogether more unworldly tone, sometimes all in the same poem. 'Diary of a Conformist' is a superb evocation of a Catholic childhood and all the craziness that goes with it -- but delivered in a way that manages to transcend all the cliches or put them to comic use. 'Thin' too is a startling performance, playing its neurotic subject matter (eating disorders) off against its strict form (a sestina). It's quite fun to follow the bird images through the book, if that doesn't make the experience sound too much like looking out for the digits in Peter Greenaway's Drowning By Numbers, but by the time they finally take flight in the final poem these Nowhere Birds will have left a lasting impression. I really hope this book wins the Forward Prize in October!