The poet Ciaran O'Driscoll was elected to membership of Aosdána at their general assembly held in Dublin on 28 March 2007. Aosdána was established by the Irish Arts Council to honour artists and writers who have made an outstanding contribution to art and literature in Ireland, and to assist them to devote their energies fully to their work.
Ciaran has become a familiar visitor to Brighton, having been invited by THE SOUTH to give a number of readings, workshops and lectures here over the past five years, most recently at PULSE, the Brighton Poetry Festival in October 2007.
Ciaran was born in Callan, Co. Kilkenny in 1943, and presently lives in Limerick, where he lectures in the School of Art and Design at the Limerick Institute of Technology. He has written five collections of poetry. The most recent, Moving On, Still There: New and Selected Poems was published by the Dedalus Press in 2001. In the same year, Liverpool University Press published his childhood memoir, A Runner Among Falling Leaves. He has won a number of awards for his work, including the Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry.
A dual language edition (in Italian and English) of his fourth collection of poems, The Old Women of Magione, was published by Volumnia Editrice in September 2006 and is now distributed in the UK by Pighog. You can buy Ciaran's new collection here.
The poem ‘The Tree Outside My Window Revisited’ in Surreal Man refers back to ‘The Tree Outside My Window’ published in Ciaran’s first collection Gog & Magog (1987)
THE TREE OUTSIDE MY WINDOW
There are many mansions in
the tree outside my window.
James Joyce is there, reciting
the sequel to Finnegans Wake
to oysters eating fillets of the rich
in its seafood restaurant,
and there’s the repentant pope
nodding in total agreement
with the Marxist theologians
of its leafy constellations.
And the cringing olive-eyed
mongrel from down the lane
takes the evening paper
from his former master’s mouth,
while the children of Peru
throw away their begging bowls
and screaming with delight
climb to the topmost branches.
O the fine ales the beautiful dead
drink in the tree outside my window!
Green is its darkness and its silver
in the breeze is starlight.
© Ciaran O'Driscoll, 1987. All rights reserved.
You can download the complete text of Gog & Magog at
http://www.irishliteraryrevival.com/ciaranodriscoll.html
