Caitríona O’Reilly interviewed for Island's Edge, December 2022; new poem on Unlaunched Books podcast; her 2016 interview on RTE Radio 1's Arena is still available.
of that epauletted century. Geraniums bloomed on windowsills in Heidelberg.
Student princes eyed the tavernkeeper’s daughter through the blond foam
of their tankards. The future must have seemed weightless
as it came nosing through the clouds, smooth as a biblical fish
throwing its giant shadow on the sea-floor, its thin gold-beater’s skin
pressed back against its ribs, cloche-hatted women in fox furs
waving through its observation windows. Composed of too much
dream-stuff to be echt matériel, shoals of them congregated silently
over London in the moon’s dark phases, concealed above clouds.
Their crews were unnerved by crackling blue haloes; eerie lightning
shot from frostbitten fingers as they lowered spy baskets
on trapeze wires below the cloud cover, taking careful soundings,
then dropped their antique payloads on the gaping population.
Those whom they did not kill scarcely believed in them,
improbable contraptions the parchment-yellow colour of old maps,
vessels a rational traveller might have chosen, a half-century earlier,
to pursue daft, round-the-world steampunk wagers. But for them –
the gilded aerialists in their giant dirigibles – the world remained a storybook
unfolding endlessly in signs and wonders, over which they drifted
in stylish accidie; leviathan-hunters, relaxed as Victorian naturalists.
And up there everything looked different:
the borders absurd, the people in their witch-fearing villages as out-of-date
as peasants in a medieval breviary. The mountains, too, seemed surpassable,
offering an alternative angle on the sublime. Occasionally there was concern:
a tear in the fabric, hooked to a typhoon’s tail above the China Sea,
or harried by storms across the Atlantic. But how lighter than air they were.
They did not understand, as they fell continually upwards,
how the nature of the element was the price of their rising:
the assiduous atom seeking an exit, thronging the fabric of their cells.
Witness was the privilege of the many: newsreels captured the death of a star
and – oh the humanity! – its last leisurely plummet in fire, its ashen armature.
Contents List
11 Ovum
12 Island
12 /1 Mirror
13 /2 Hunger
14 /3 Viaticum
15 Spanish Fly
16 Amanita Virosa
17 Ariadne
19 Empty House
21 Comparative Mythography
23 Geis
23 i/ Our Lady of the Dry Tree
24 ii/ Night Sweat
25 iii/ Leaven
26 iv/ Geis
27 v/ O
28 vi/ Isolate but Preserve
29 vii/ Riddle
30 viii/ Jonah
31 The Winter Suicides
32 Snow
34 Polar
36 Iceland
37 The Gardener
39 The Servant Question
42 The Antikythera Mechanism
44 Baltic Amber
46 Blue Poles
47 Clotho
48 Autotomy
49 The Man with No Name as Vital Principle: A Ghazal
50 Chiune Sugihara
51 The Airship Era
53 An Idea of Iowa
54 Everything Flowers
55 Bee on Agastache
56 Triptych
56 i/ West Front
57 ii/ Nave
58 iii/ Bell Tower
59 August on Dungeness
60 Potlatch
61 Komorebi
63 Notes
Related Reviews
'Often strongly elegiac in tone, what O'Reilly memorialises is the experience of silence, loss and grief in haunting poems which strive to give body to things powerfully apprehended though invisible… Though Geis has its roots in traditions of mythology and folklore, there are few true traces of the supernatural in O'Reilly's profoundly attentive and ultimately life-affirming account of loss and fragility. Her concern is with what is absent, intangible and invisible, but the language in which she writes it is beautifully present.' – Jane Draycott & John Burnside, PBS Bulletin [on Geis]
‘She understands the limitations of the self and the fragility of the world – but this awareness of temporality in its turn gives O’Reilly’s work its authority and its arresting, lyrical power...wry humour is much in evidence throughout O’Reilly’s meticulous poetry, balancing what is frequently its devastating emotional freight.’ – Neil Hegarty, Irish Times
'Caitríona O’Reilly’s poetry collection The Sea Cabinet really impresses with its intellectual and emotional range. Not an overtly lyrical poet, O’Reilly nonetheless manages to explore the private self at odds with an environment and culture now in permanent flux. Her sense of the trail left by history is absorbing and fresh.’ - Mary O’Donnell, Sunday Independent (Books of the Year)
’Excitingly sophisticated…possessed of metaphysical eloquence and quietly meditative intelligence, from this most European of Irish poets.’ – Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times (Books of the Year), on The Sea Cabinet
’This is a profoundly unconventional collection. It is not, to begin with, lyric verse. Rather, it is an exploration of disturbance and alienation; whose strikingly ornate, often historically derived imagery generates a sense of coalescence, of the irresistible thickening-up of experience… When she stands back, lettting the poem build a new myth around an objection of quotidian apprehension – a Heliotrope, an X-ray – O’Reilly can be among the best we have.’ – Fiona Sampson, The Irish Times, on The Sea Cabinet
’The most startlingly accomplished début collection by any Irish poet since Paul Muldoon’s New Weather in 1973.’ – Patrick Crotty, The Irish Times, on The Nowhere Birds
‘Whether enthralled or appalled, she beholds and magnifies the world and its strange creatures (including ourselves) in poems that are formally versatile and linguistically copious.’ – Michael Longley, on The Nowhere Birds
