Shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize for Poetry 2011.
This 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.
‘[On O'Donoghue's Selected Poems] His skill lies in rendering small delights and memories vivid and touching in lucid, deceptively simple verse.’ Alan Brownjohn, Sunday Times
‘[On O'Donoghue's Selected Poems] Gifted from the beginning, [O'Donoghue] has never wavered from the fidelities that have made him a very fine poet.’ Thomas McCarthy, Irish Times
‘O'Donoghue is an unusual and gifted poet. Nothing in his poems strikes me as false.’ Nick Laird, Daily Telegraph
‘Sane and beautiful, these poems are powerful in a way that is rare in contemporary verse.’ Guardian
Author
About Bernard O'Donoghue
Bernard O'Donoghue was born in Cullen, Co. Cork in 1945. He is a Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, where he teaches Medieval English. He has published four collections of poetry, The Weakness (1991), Gunpowder winner of the 1995 Whitbread Award for Poetry), Here Nor There (1999) and Outliving (2003). His Selected Poems was published by Faber in 2008.
