Geis
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€16.99
'Geis' is a word from Irish mythology meaning a supernatural taboo or injunction on behaviour. In her long-awaited third collection, Caitríona O'Reilly examines the 'geis' in all of its psychological, emotional, and moral suggestiveness: exploring the prohibitions and compulsions under which we sometimes place ourselves, or find ourselves placed. In poems that range from the searingly personal to the more playfully abstract and philosophical, O'Reilly's characteristic imaginative range and linguistic verve are everywhere in evidence. These are poems that question our sometimes tenuous links with the world, with others, and even with ourselves, but which ultimately celebrate the richness of experience and the power of language to affirm it. Geis is Caitríona O’Reilly's third collection. It won the Irish Times Poetry Now Award 2016, and was shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize. It follows her critically acclaimed earlier books, The Nowhere Birds (2001), shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and The Sea Cabinet (2006), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation which was also shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award.
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 and was shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize in association with Listowel Writers' Week. It is also 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.