Here Nor There. This item is unavailable.Here Nor There

Bernard O'Donoghue's third collection of poetry is a book about the middle ground- being in between two places, being neither here nor there. Once more mining the memories of his rural upbringing in County Cork, O'Donoghue weaves through the collection a series of tender elegies for the characters and places of his youth. The poems are touched with a quiet mourning, not only for a passing age, but for a homeland to which the author no longer truly belongs. In the words of John Burnside, O'Donoghue wrights with 'scrupulous honesty' challenging 'our pretended knowledge of the world'. His position of not quite belonging gives him an outsider's scepticism and this verse, which captures in its metre the careful movement of thought and the rhythms of storytelling, chips away at certainties and reaches towards a tentative understanding.

Award-winning author of Gunpowder, Bernard O'Donoghue is a dignified, richly humane poet, who has established a reputation for his lyrical and elegiac reflections on his rural upbringing in County Cork. His third collection, Here Nor There, sustains and extends that tone of quiet, mournful recollection in a powerful series of poems on characters and places from his youth--as well as elegies for friends and other poets. Haunted by a sense of belonging neither to Ireland nor to England--where he now lives, writes and teaches-- O'Donoghue explores what it means to be "outcast / Alike from the one shore and the other" (Nechtan). Uncovering the complex, often discomforting, edge of that exclusion in poems such as "Command of English" and "Unknownst to the People", O'Donoghue's reflections show a sense of palpable unhappiness and bitter memories, but are nonetheless informed by a "will to go on" (Dachyroma). Admitting into this sense of human frailty poems on love, death and hubris, O'Donoghue refines his many themes through a remarkable, often touching, style of storytelling which proclaims why, for him, being "Neither here nor there" is "therefore home" ("Westering Home"). --David Marriott