Seatown and Earlier Poems

Product Description Seatown and Earlier Poems combines selections from Conor O’Callaghan’s first book The History of Rain with his second volume Seatown for his North American debut. These poems are powerfully attractive and accessible on first reading, yet they reward rereading, particularly when forms such as terza rima, sestinas, and villanelles disclose themselves as the inevitable complement of a contemporary, on-the-edge setting. Review Conor O'Callaghan's poetry is both simple and beautiful, his style is open and honest...The reader can feel comfortable reading this poetry and knowing exactly what O'Callaghan is saying. Being too accessible can be death for a poet, but O'Callaghan's work deserves and expects rereading because his poems are timeless and say something new each time they are read. --Miles Woolen, The Bloomsbury ReviewWake Forest Press has done a service by giving us another of Ireland's new poets. I believe Conor O'Callaghan will 'make tracks' on this side of the ocean as well as in his native land. Without fundamentally altering, this muscular voice expresses a range of stances toward the legacy of its changing world: humor, eroticism, a kind of jaundiced acceptance tempered by life-affirming irony. --Judith Kitchen, The Georgia Review 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.