Threading The Light

The Buried Breath announces the arrival of a striking new voice and poetic talent. With formal ease and a sharply engaged sense of ethical inquiry, these lucid, lyrical poems delve into art and history, remembered lives and contemporary conflicts, for illumination and insight.

"Love, loss, memory, history, place are familiar preoccupations in John O’Donnell’s work; and, though poetry’s subject matter may be similar, a unique voice explores these themes in unique ways. The poems take us to very different places: Shakespeare in Ireland, the Holocaust, pioneering in Oregon, a grandmother’s Alzheimer’s. Here is a poet who searches for truth, and whether O’Donnell is remembering “me, surly in a sleeping-bag, fifteen” or the Omagh atrocity, the voice is always direct and honest, while capturing the close-up and personal with a wonderful fluency. O’Donnell’s poetry explores the steady and steadying presence of love within a family context but it also gives us the bigger picture, pictures of injustice, turmoil, ‘the unfathomable’ and what O’Donnell calls ‘a deep darker than ink’. Turn to these enriching and engaging poems in Sunlight: New and Selected Poems; the poems will turn to you. And you will be rewarded."—Niall MacMonagle, from the Introduction