For twenty years Micheal O’Siadhail’s beloved wife, Bríd, suffered from Parkinson’s disease. These love poems chronicle the last two years of her life, her death and his grief. In Love Life, now available again in his Collected Poems, he told their story of over three decades of marriage. In this sonnet sequence their love faces illness and death and sounds the depths of parting. There is a tenderness, intensity and gratitude which will resonate with those who know both love and loss.
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 Valéry, 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.
