Commentary

THE MUSICS OF BELONGING: THE POETRY OF MICHEAL O'SIADHAIL Ed. Marc Caball and David F. Ford (Carysfort Press, Dublin 2007)

THE SHAPE OF LIVING David F. Ford (Harper Collins, London 1997) and in US Published by BAKER BOOK HOUSE, Grand Rapids 1998)

Critical Essays

Schriker, Gale, C. 'From Yeats's "Great Wheel" to O'Siadhail's "The Image Wheel"'in Learning The Trade: Essays on W.B. Yeats & Contemporary Poetry Ed. Fleming, Deborah. Locusthill Press, West Cornwall Connecticut, 1993

Nolan, Lorraine, 'The Poetry of Micheal O'Siadhail' M.A.Thesis, University College Dublin, 1994

Swiontkowski Schriker, Gale, C. 'Rondo to Jazz: The Poetry of Micheal O'Siadhail in Éire/Ireland, Fall 1994

Audrey O'Toole Pfeil Das Leben ist im Fluß - Der Dichter Micheal O'Siadhail Irland Journal March 1997

Shimizu, Shigeo, "Micheal O'Siadhail: Urban Poet, " in Yeats Studies (The Bulletin of the Yeats Society of Japan), 29, pp.94-102, 1998 [in Japanese]

Tochigi, Nobuaki, "Micheal O'Siadhail: A Brief Introduction," in Gendaishitechoo, 42, 10, pp.176-181, 1999 [in Japanese].

Adams, Jennifer 'Can How We Remember Shape What We Become?' Micheal O'Siadhail's The Gossamer Wall: Poems in Witness to the Holocaust in Dialogue with Emil L. Fachenheim', M. Phil. Dissertation, St. Catherine's College, University of Cambridge, 2003

Selected Critical Comments

Globe

'In Globe, O’Siadhail has delivered a timely and disquiting dissection of the planet’s parlous state with trade-mark fluency.'
- Sarah Crown, The Guardian

'Perhaps more than anything he may be seen as a European poet, since his subject matter has often been European experience...There is no mistaking the passion with which O’Siadhail writes when he takes on political events, and it is this political consciousness which sets him apart.'
– Maurice Harman, The Irish Times

'A good place to find powerful and positive poetry...as a whole this masterful book gives a comprehensive and somehow ultimately affirmative view of change in its many forms.'
– Ryan Agee, The Skinny

Love Life

O’Siadhail is both a poet of the world and for the world….Like Yeats, O’Siadhail embraces the full range and depth of English. Like Yeats, he is tuned to the musical possibilities of poetry…O’Siadhail’s poetry is intricately complex yet accessible. He is a maker, a seer, a narrator, a praiser, a lover exploring ‘the wonderful and bewildering paradoxes and complementarities, the constant change and becoming’
- Richard Dilworth Rust, Irish Literary Supplement. Fall 2006

'This collection is a hymn to the transformative experience of a live given over to a single love….A collection that is tender but not rose-tinted and a fitting tribute to a lifetime’s love.'
-Sarah Crown, The Guardian

'… a fine book – intelligent, erotic, sensual and evocative…one of the most beautiful books of poetry that I have read. There is a fusion of the physical and the cerebral aspects of love that is reminiscent of John Donne at his best…This is a love life, and one that deserves to be read and quoted by those in need of words to describe this most protean of emotions.'
- Eugene O’Brien, The Irish Book Review

'O’Siadhail is comfortably surefooted within the arc of his own poetics. Although it’s music that predominates, his imagery is often aptly fresh. His rhythms are beautifully exact.'
- Fiona Sampson, The Irish Times

'O’Siadhail is a wonderfully readable writer – fluent and clear.'
-The Dubliner

The Gossamer Wall

‘The collection strikes me as almost utterly unusual, awesome, in its way. The straightness, with no sign of facile hype or self-congratulation; the rhymes, somehow, against the odds not belying but bringing home some truths in a fresh voice and vantage point.’
- John Felstiner, Stanford University

'This book is a series of poem-sequences in witness to the Holocaust of the European Jews...What distinguishes this book is the great skill and sensitivity with which these events are selected and told. O'Siadhail calls on an array of traditional verse forms, these being among the most serviceable vessels we have for carrying overwhelmingly difficult emotional content (think of Wilfred Owen's sonnets on the agonies of trench warfare when reading O'Siadhail's sonnets set in the camps).... Think of other poem sequences dealing with such material, for example Ruth Whitman's The Testing of Hannah Senesh. In the best of them, as in that book and here, an infinitely-long story, untellable in its entirety, is condensed into a few intense images, a sequence of clear and resonate notes.'
- Sarah Kafatou, Harvard Review 26

‘This is nothing short of the history of the holocaust, from Hitler’s ascent to power to the liberation of the camps and the aftermath. This is an extraordinary and wonderful work.’
- David Hanley, The Enchanted Way, RTE Radio 1

‘The Gossamer Wall is really one long narrative poem, which addresses meticulously, and with great sensitivity, that most evil episode in human history when civilised man coldly planned and carried out the extermination of six million men, women, and children for the crime of being different. The book is an exceptional achievement, evidence of the poet’s wounded fascination before such human evil and testifying to a painstaking labour of something akin to outraged love for all those who suffered.’
- Patsy McGarry, The Irish Times

‘This is a beautiful book. Thank you for writing it.’
- Peter Tiefenbach, CBC Radio 1

‘His book, which argues the importance of not narrowing down life in all its jazzy, rich complexity to the ideologies of blood and soil, also carries some chilling Eastern European resonances…I believe that work such as O’Siadhail’s help us to hear the stifled voices – the voices of the six million whose voices can be heard behind the gossamer wall.
- Declan McCormack, The Sunday Independent

‘Nobody immediately thinks of a book of poems as a page-turner. Yet you pick up Micheal O’Siadhail’s The Gossamer Wall and you won’t put it down without reading it from beginning to end.
- Ciaran Carty, The Sunday Tribune

‘O'Siadhail personalises both captives and victims, which allows him to
humanise them for us or give them back to us as real human beings and not numbers or ranks.... This is all in all a fascinating book, a book of windows into terror we in our soft Irishness cannot begin to imagine. It's a credit to Micheal O'Siadhail and a brutal reminder to us all.
- Fred Johnston in Books Ireland