The June Poetry Book Group will be meeting via Zoom
Monday, June 16th • 6:30 PM ET / 11:30 PM IST via Zoom
Session open to all: no registration required.
Click on this link to join the Zoom session
Find out about Solas Nua's Poetry Book Group and titles list
Join the Book Group's Facebook Group here!
Winner of the Irish Times Poetry Now Award
Geis is a word from Irish mythology meaning a supernatural taboo or injunction on behavior. In her third volume of poetry (following the critically acclaimed The Nowhere Birds and The Sea Cabinet), Caitríona O’Reilly examines the geis in all of its psychological, emotional, and moral suggestiveness: exploring the prohibitions and compulsions under which we sometimes place ourselves, or find ourselves placed. Geis is the first appearance of a volume by Caitríona O’Reilly in North America, though she has been anthologized numerous times, including in The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry, Volume I (2005) and The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry (2nd edition, 2011).
In poems that range from the searingly personal to the more playfully abstract and philosophical, this poet’s characteristic imaginative range and linguistic verve are everywhere in evidence. These are poems that question our sometimes tenuous links with the world, with others, and even with ourselves, but which ultimately celebrate the richness of experience and the power of language to affirm it.
“These are smart poems, and yet they wear their smartness as one might wear a loose garment, making their utterances elegant and even charming, but always full of probing questions—the scholar’s pursuits. Certainly Caitríona O’Reilly is a smart poet, a well-educated one, but more importantly, a lyrical intelligence informs her erudition.”
– M. G. Stephens, Rain Taxi
“The world of her poems is that created by one gazing through a prism. She not only marvels at the strange but recreates it as the mysterious. The effect is intoxicating. The hangover illumination.”
– Hayden Murphy, The Herald Scotland
About the Author
Caitríona O’Reilly was born in Dublin in 1973, grew up in Wicklow and Dublin, and now lives in Lincoln. She studied archeology and English at Trinity College, Dublin, where she wrote her doctoral thesis on American literature. O’Reilly also held the Harper-Wood Studentship from St. John’s College, Cambridge.
Caitríona O’Reilly’s first collection, The Nowhere Birds, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2001 and won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2002 (given to the best new book by any Irish writer). Her second collection, The Sea Cabinet (Bloodaxe Books, 2006), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award in 2007.
All events are listed in Eastern Time and Irish Standard Time.
