Life
Ed. at TCD; author of The Nowhere Birds (2001), poetry collection; incl. in Selina Guinness, The New Irish Poets (Bloodaxe 2004); David Wheatley is her partner.
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Works
Poetry, The Nowhere Birds (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe 2001),
63pp.
Reviews incl. Ruth Padel, The Poem and the Journey and Sixty Poems to Read Along the Way, in The Irish Times (2 March 2007), Weekend, p.11.
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Commentary
[q. a.,] The Irish Times (23 June, 2001): The Nowhere Birds (2001), poetry collection, called ‘private and philosophical’; ‘strict formalist’; ‘the most startlingly accomplished debut collection by any poet since Paul Muldoon’s New Weather in 1972’; chart the growth of a young girl’s awareness … written with such cool finesse that it would be vulgar to speculate as to whether they are autobiographical …’; ‘technical command is dazzling’.
Bernard O’Donoghue, reviewing Paul Muldoon, Vera of Las Vegas, with sundry other poets’ collections incl. The Nowhere Birds (2001), supplies approving notice of Catriona O’Reilly in Times Literary Supplement [Irish issue], 29 June 2001, p.9-10; p.10.
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Quotations
“Nineteen Eighty-Four”: ‘Saint Laurence O’Toole meant business / with his his cheekbones
and stiff mitre, / Mary wore lipstick and no shoes / so I sat on her side
of the altar.’ (Quoted in
Niall MacMonagle, Off the Wall, Marino 2002; see Irish Times [brief notice],
21 Dec. 2002.)
“Poliomyelitis”: ‘The Pool at the centre of the broken-tiled room / was once a swimming pool for local boys // with boils on the neck and chilblained knees. / Their old joints murmur like the sea’s // gradual encroachment on the choked-up gorge of nineteen-fifties noblesse oblige: // grass sprouts from the rafters of the Big House / now, like hairs from a Pensioner’s nose. // The swimming pool was long ago condemned / though a rusty ladder still dissolves at one end // and even the gulls won’t land on water / this brackish and rancid. I carry the taint of it / away like my father, bend over it in dreams / to watch the dead plants thrive beneath the water, // the Pocked silt open and the nymphs rising / to invade another element, breaking the surface / till the room’s air fills with black butterflies brushing their wings against my mind’s ceiling.’ (Times Literary Supplement, 25 June 2004, p.17.)
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