Dear Life

Dennis O'Driscoll died too young, and before the US publication of his new book of poems, on Christmas Eve 2012. Dear Life represents the work of a truly international poet who spoke far beyond his native Ireland. A longing-filled recognition of the preciousness of existence, Dear Life draws upon the most contemporary of issues--the internet era, compensation culture, global warming--to address the timeless topics of working and aging, loving and dying, God and mammon. As Seamus Heaney writes in his foreword, O'Driscoll's "work was a new growth ring in the old tree of Irish poetry, and while his life was spent in passionate devotion to the art it was also--given his distinguished career in the civil service--devoted to Ireland." O'Driscoll's poems give voice to a nation, with its twenty-first-century attitudes toward religion, economics, and nationality, its immigration, poverty, and consumerism, while his ambitious title sequence attempts a rigorous and unflinchingly personal exploration of the purpose of human life.