Dear Life - by Dennis O'Driscoll (Paperback)

About the Book

Dear Life focuses largely on mortality in a consumerist world, and foreshadows the author's sudden death in December 2012.

Book Synopsis

Dennis O'Driscoll died too young, and before the US publication of his new book of poems, on Christmas Eve 2012. Dear Life represents the work of a truly international poet who spoke far beyond his native Ireland. A longing-filled recognition of the preciousness of existence, Dear Life draws upon the most contemporary of issues--the internet era, compensation culture, global warming--to address the timeless topics of working and aging, loving and dying, God and mammon. As Seamus Heaney writes in his foreword, O'Driscoll's "work was a new growth ring in the old tree of Irish poetry, and while his life was spent in passionate devotion to the art it was also--given his distinguished career in the civil service--devoted to Ireland." O'Driscoll's poems give voice to a nation, with its twenty-first-century attitudes toward religion, economics, and nationality, its immigration, poverty, and consumerism, while his ambitious title sequence attempts a rigorous and unflinchingly personal exploration of the purpose of human life.

About the Author

Dennis O'Driscoll: Dennis O'Driscoll (1954-2012), a former editor of Poetry Ireland Review, was the author of nine collections of poetry as well as book of interviews with Seamus Heaney, Stepping Stones. Poetry Review famously (and deservedly) called O'Driscoll "one of the best-read men in the Western world."