One Crimson Thread - Softcover

O'Siadhail, Micheal

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1780371276 ISBN 13: 9781780371276

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 2016

Synopsis

For twenty years Micheal O'Siadhail's beloved wife, BrĄd, suffered from Parkinson's disease. These love poems chronicle the last two years of her life, her death, and his grief. In this sonnet sequence their love faces illness and death and sounds the depths of parting. There is a tenderness, intensity, and gratitude that will resonate with those who know both love and loss.

About this title

About the Author:

Micheal O'Siadhail [pronounced Mee-hall Oh Sheel] is a prolific Irish poet whose work sets the intensities of a life against the background of worlds shaken by change. His Collected Poems (2013) draws on thirteen previous collections, nine of these published by Bloodaxe, including Hail! Madam Jazz: New and Selected Poems (1992), Our Double Time (1998), Poems 1975-1995 (1999), The Gossamer Wall: poems in witness to the Holocaust (2002), Love Life (2005), Globe (2007) and Tongues (2010). His latest collection is One Crimson Thread, due from Bloodaxe in September 2015. Born in 1947, O'Siadhail was educated at Clongowes Wood College, Trinity College Dublin and the University of Oslo. He has been a lecturer at Trinity College Dublin and a professor at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Among his many academic works are Learning Irish (Yale University Press, 1988), Modern Irish (Cambridge University Press, 1989) and Say but the Word: Vision and Voice in Poetry, ed. David F. Ford & Margie Tolstoi (Hinds Publishers, 2015). He is a fluent speaker of a surprising number and range of languages, including Norwegian, Icelandic, German, Welsh and Japanese. As well as some of the great English-language writers (Donne, Milton, Yeats, Kavanagh), his main influences include much literature in other languages, read and assimilated in the original (Irish monastic and folk poetry, Dante, Rilke, Paul Valery, Karin Boye, the Eddas and the Sagas). In 1987 he resigned his professorship order to write poetry full-time, supported by giving numerous readings in many parts of the world. He won the Marten Toonder Prize for Literature in 1998. A critical study of his work, Musics of Belonging: The Poetry of Micheal O'Siadhail, edited by Marc Caball and David F. Ford, was published by Carysfort Press in 2007. He now divides his time between Dublin and New York.

Review:

'I read slowly, carefully and with deep emotion One Crimson Thread. It is a beautiful, beautiful but terribly sad poem of love' - Jean Vanier. 'In this poignant and hopeful sequence of poems, Micheal O'Siadhail explores how a devoted husband and wife respond and adjust when she is greatly altered by Parkinson's disease, examining his states of mind and feeling, his daily adjustments her changing personality, and finally his sorrow and brokenness at her death. Yet at the spiritual heart of this sequence are the ways in which the poems courageously show how the couple's deep-rooted love searches for ways to overcome her debilitating illness, their fear and dread, and their eventual loss. The vivid image of the title of these linked sonnets demonstrates that their love always connects these lovers by an incorruptible, unbreakable "crimson thread". As the poet memorably writes: "I hush you in my arms to tell you how / This suffering still sounds our depths of love." - Joseph Heininger. 'A controlled sensuousness of language and it comes as near as poetry can, without being confessional, to conveying the overtones and textures of actual experience' - Anne Stevenson. 'He is a delightful poet - I don't know of any other who writes with such affection of the everyday, our changing moods and chances' - --Louis Simpson.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1780371276
• ISBN 13: 9781780371276
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 158