Exemplary Damages [Paperback]

Dennis O'Driscoll (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0856463507 | ISBN-13: 978-0856463501 | Publication Date: June 1, 2004

`Exemplary Damages' is as fine and varied a collection as its five predecessors. It captures contemporary attitudes towards life, love and God with unfaltering accuracy in styles which range from the richly sensuous to the mercilessly mordant. Whether depicting a group of middle-aged `lads' at tea break or struggling to comprehend the English spoken at an EU seminar, Dennis O'Driscoll's skill in observation and metaphor succeeds in conveying humour and pathos with an unsentimental robustness.

Born in Thurles, County Tipperary in 1954, Dennis O'Driscoll has received wide recognition for his previous collections, including a Lannan Literary Award in 1999. A selection of his essays and reviews, `Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams' (Gallery Press), appeared in 2001. A civil servant since the age of 16, he works for Irish Customs in Dublin.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

He shares a surname with the hero of one of Yeats' most rural, folkloric poems, "The Host of the Air," and he writes as musically as Irish small-town patriot Gabriel Fitzmaurice (I and the Village [BKL D 1 02]), but O'Driscoll is a city man. Which means little in terms of ultimate concerns, but it makes him sound downright neighborly to most other First World readers. The poems in part 1 of his magnetically readable sixth collection are rife with medical images and social-welfare issues, and they sound like any modern city dweller's anxieties: Will the kids come home all right? Will my heart beat long enough? Will I languish some day in a sick bed? Where did God go? The poems in part 2 are more narrative, fuller of nature, more focused on those clashing continuities, time and human nature. They carp brilliantly about nostalgia, artistic reverence, and official wisdom. "England," in particular, must be one of the most scathing yet not unaffectionate deconstructions of his nation's nemesis that an Irishman has ever written. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

'O'Driscoll already has in considerable measure all the best qualities of contemporary Irish verse, its exactitude, its swing, its verbal harmonies... his poems should bring rewards to all readers of contemporary poetry'Graham Christian, Harvard Review

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 88 pages
• Publisher: Anvil Press Poetry (June 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0856463507
• ISBN-13: 978-0856463501
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,445,408 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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