Surreal Man

21 Poems

Paintings by Giorgio de Chirico and Rene Magritte provide a springboard for Ciaran O’Driscoll’s engagement with the theme of surrealism. He moves from art to surreal aspects of the contemporary world, in particular war and the increasing isolation of the individual in a greed-driven society. These poems are stories, anecdotes and impressions relayed through various voices. Dark absurdities and contradictions, banalities and pretensions are exposed by O’Driscoll’s characteristically cutting wit, and here and there a beacon of hard-won hope lights a way through the globalising gloom.

'He transforms… details of solitude into a semi-surrealist vision of our world.
We need such hard-won high spirits.'
John Montague

'Ciaran O’Driscoll is a poet of the first order.'
Pearse Hutchinson, The RTE Guide

With its blend of dark humour and lyrical craft, it's no surprise that Ciaran O'Driscoll's poetry has received international acclaim. His work combines a killer sense of humour with the acumen and verbal dexterity gained over a lifetime creating and teaching art and literature. He has read from his work and lectured on art and literature throughout Europe and America.

Ciaran was born in Callan, Co. Kilkenny in 1943, and presently lives in Limerick. He is a retired lecturer from the School of Art and Design at the Limerick Institute of Technology.

In 2007, he was elected to Aosdána, an institution established by the Irish Arts Council to honour Irish artists and writers who have made an outstanding contribution to art and literature. He is an Entry in The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature (1996) as well as its Concise version (2000).

He has published six collections of poetry: Gog and Magog (Salmon Poetry, Galway, 1987); The Poet and His Shadow (Dedalus Press, Dublin, 1990); Listening to Different Drummers (Ibid,1993); The Old Women of Magione (Ibid, 1997); Moving On, Still There: New and Selected Poems (Ibid, 2001); and Life Monitor (Three Spires Press, Cork, 2009).

He has also published two poetry chapbooks, The Myth of the South with Dedalus in 1992 and Surreal Man with Pighog in 2006 (now published as a Pighog ebook). His work has appeared in a number of anthologies, most recently in Poems of the Decade: An Anthology of the Forward Books of Poetry 2002 -2011 (Forward/Faber).

Selections of his poetry have been translated into many European languages. Vecchie Donne di Magione (a collection of his poems with Italian translations by Rita Castigli) was published by Volumnia Editrice, Perugia, in 2006. A collection with Slovene translations is due from Kud France Preseren, Ljubljana, in 2013.

Liverpool University Press published his childhood memoir, A Runner Among Falling Leaves, in 2001 and he has had various prose in anthologies and on radio. His novel A Year's Midnight, published by Pighog in 2012.

Ciaran O’Driscoll has won a number of awards for his work, including a Bursary in Literature from the Irish Arts Council (1983), the James Joyce Literary Millennium Prize (1989), and the Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry (2000).

He is a committee member of Cuisle, Limerick City’s International Poetry Festival.

Reviewing his most recent poetry collection Life Monitor in The Irish Times, Eamonn Grennan wrote of Ciaran O’Driscoll as "a poet in confident possession and exercise of his craft. [His] poems do what good poems should do, widening and deepening the world for the rest of us."

And John MacKenna praised his novel, A Year’s Midnight (also available as an ebook) as 'a wonderful and beautiful piece of work - written by someone who has the eye of a painter, the ear of a listener and the pen of a poet. A book that entwines sensual delight with wry humour; landscape with lunacy - a joy from first to last.'