Exemplary Damages - Softcover

O'Driscoll, Dennis

4.17

6 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0856463507 ISBN 13: 9780856463501

Publisher: Anvil Press Poetry, 2004

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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.

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About the Author:

Born in Thurles, County Tipperary in 1954, Dennis O'Driscoll is widely-known as a critic as well as a poet; a selection of his essays and reviews, Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams (The Gallery Press), appeared in 2001. In 1999, he received a Lannan Literary Award. A civil servant since the age of 16, he works for Irish Customs in Dublin.

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
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