Books by Bernard O'Donoghue

Composed during the fourteenth century in the English Midlands, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight describes the events that follow when a mysterious green-coloured knight rides into King Arthur's Camelot in deep mid-winter. The mighty knight presents a challenge to the court: he will allow himself to be struck by one blow, on the condition that he will be allowed to return the strike on the following New Year's Eve. Sir Gawain takes up the challenge, decapitating the stranger - only to see the Green Knight seize up his own severed head and ride away, leaving Gawain to seek him out and honour their pact. Blending Celtic myth and Christian faith, Gawain is among the greatest Middle English poems: a tale of magic, chivalry and seduction.

Shortlisted for the 2016 T. S. Eliot Prize, this new collection of expert lyric poems from Whitbread Poetry Award winner Bernard O'Donoghue movingly animates the scenery and characters of his childhood in County Cork. The mythologies of family are here: the relative who maybe emigrated to America to be 'set upon at his arrival / for the few pounds sewn inside his coat'; the memory of 'Barty, a hopeless speller', caned so hard he dances; the big top come to the town park; the stolen apples raided from the orchard near the old school. Here too are the collective myths, the groundwater of older texts - Virgil's Aeneid, the Riddles of the Exeter Book, Dante's Purgatorio, the lives of the ancients and the gods - all of which in O'Donoghue's dexterous and discerning care reach forward from their long-ago origins to echo down our own lives.Many of these poems speak in elegy: for Connolly's Bookshop - closed down and mourned - or for lost friends; for the nostalgic places to which one cannot return, the field-corners and long roads of the deep past: 'So wistful is the recognition now / of the places that I hardly noted'.The stunning title piece, and the deft and poignant poems that make up this collection, will confirm O'Donoghue's place as one of the most approachable and agile voices in contemporary Irish and British poetry.'I'm fascinated by O'Donoghue's wry vision, his infinitely gentle manner of displacing our more predictable reactions to things as they are so that we glimpse their underlying tragedy.' Tom Paulin

The book brings together subtle and moving meditations on exile and belonging, travel and home, and honours many friends and loved ones along the way. In a series of poems that frequently recall the south-west Ireland of the author's childhood, Farmers Cross shows the author writing at his visionary and lyrical best.

Winner of the Whitbread Prize for Poetry, Bernard O'Donoghue's poems have long captivated readers with their lyricism, their grace and with what John Burnside has called their 'scrupulous honesty'.

Scrutinizes Heaney's language in order to examine his theory of poetry and the writer's responsibility to art and politics. The author, himself a poet, works chronologically through the poetry and discusses it in light of Heaney's writings on the appropriate language of poetry.