The Sun King - Hardcover

O'Callaghan, Conor

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1852355484 ISBN 13: 9781852355487

Publisher: Gallery Books, 2013

Synopsis

POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION Poems in The Sun King, Conor O’Callaghan’s fourth collection, happen in the spaces between parallel realities: virtual and pastoral; North Carolina, Ireland and Manchester’s Chinatown district; loss and desire. His wit and virtuosity match his devotion to ‘the carnal surface’ of things (woodstoves, voicemail codes, sprinklers, money) and of the copious words we have for them. The book centres on a handful of longer poems: a spell, part memory and part hallucination, in a derelict farmhouse by the Irish Sea; an elegy for the Celtic Tiger’s all-consuming boom; a less than faithful translation of Lorca’s beautiful tale of infidelity, and a magnificent reconfiguring of the server room of an office building as a site of pilgrimage. The collection ends with a series of couplets, ‘The Pearl Works’, an improvisation on Twitter, that achieves an improbable mysticism via a succession of invocations of the sun and the given life’s ‘astronomical fluke’. The Sun King, Conor O’Callaghan’s first collection in eight years, is an event worth celebrating.

About this title

About the Author

Born in 1968 in Newry in Northern Ireland, Conor O Callaghan grew up in Dundalk, a town just south of the Irish border. He served as Writer-in-Residence at University College, Dublin, taught at Wake Forest University for four years, and co-held the Heimbold Chair in Irish Studies at Villanova University. Currently, he teaches at Sheffield Hallam University in England, where he teaches courses in creative writing, modern poetry, and Anglo-Irish literature. He presently lives in England, but has spent time traveling around England, Ireland, the United States, and Italy. WFU Press has published Seatown and Earlier Poems (2000); Fiction (2005), which was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award; and most recently The Sun King (2013). His earliest books include The History of Rain (1993) and Seatown (1999), both published in Ireland by The Gallery Press. He is also the editor of The Wake Forest Book of Irish Poetry, Volume III. O Callaghan is the recipient of a number of awards, including the Patrick Kavanagh Award for his first collection of poetry, the Rooney Prize Special Award, and the Times Educational Fellowship. He was shortlisted for the Forward Prize in 1994. In addition to poetry, Conor O Callaghan s interests extend to writing on sport, especially soccer and cricket. In 1996, Irish national radio aired O Callaghan s acclaimed radio documentary on cricket in Ireland, The Season. His prose memoir entitled Red Mist: Roy Keane and the Football Civil War deals with the public uproar surrounding Ireland s involvement in the 2002 World Cup and made the bestseller lists in Ireland and the UK."

Edition details

• Publisher: Gallery Books
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1852355484
• ISBN 13: 9781852355487
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 72