The Sea Cabinet - Paperback

by Caitríona O'Reilly (Author)

Caitríona O'Reilly's poetry is remarkable for its precise observation of the natural world. Her second collection, The Sea Cabinet, broadens that clear-sighted vision in poems also haunted by history, consolidating the achievement of her prizewinning début volume, The Nowhere Birds. Her title-poem conjures the vanished world of the whaling industry, and serves as a starting-point for other acute meditations on natural and cultural obsolescence. Yet the habitual concerns of the lyric self are present too, in poems which enact the dilemmas and anxieties of the individual amidst a rapidly changing environment. The Sea Cabinet was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. Caitríona O'Reilly's first collection The Nowhere Birds won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, given for the best book by any new Irish writer published in 2001. Her third collection Geis won the Irish Times Poetry Now Award 2016.

Author Biography

Caitríona O'Reilly was born in Dublin in 1973, grew up in Wicklow and Dublin, and now lives in Lincoln. She studied archaeology and English at Trinity College Dublin, where she wrote a doctoral thesis on American literature; she has also held the Harper-Wood Studentship from St John's College, Cambridge. Her 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. Her third collection, Geis (Bloodaxe Books, UK; Wake Forest University Press, USA, 2015), won the Irish Times Poetry Now Award 2016, was shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize in association with Listowel Writers' Week, and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She is a freelance writer and critic, has written for BBC Radio 4, translated from the Galician of María do Cebreiro, and published some fiction. She has collaborated with artist Isabel Nolan, edited several issues of Poetry Ireland Review, and was a contributing editor of the Irish poetry journal Metre.