This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here. There is a reaching for the unsayable throughout this collection, whether it is thinking about the future, people's inner lives or the shadows of place, O'Neill is wholeheartedly engaged with the unfathomable nature of living. To read these poems is to be part of his exuberance for the physical and visual experience of living, be that lying in a field, being with loved ones or watching the movement of light through a day. Each moment is brimming with imagery of its past and future, so these poems bring out the mutability and movement that both blurs and pinpoints events. Michael O'Neill has lectured at Durham University since 1979, where he is a Professor of English. He co-founded and co-edited Poetry Durham from 1982 to 1994. His critical studies include The All-Sustaining Air (OUP, 2007), an exploration of Romantic poetry's influence on poets since 1900. His first collection The Stripped Bed, was published by Collins Harvill in 1990, Arc published his second collection, Wheel, to critical acclaim.
Michael O'Neill was born in Aldershot in 1953 and moved to Liverpool in 1960. He read English at Exeter College, Oxford, and from 1979 he lectured in English at Durham University, where he was Professor of English and Assistant Director of the Centre for Poetry and Poetics. He co-founded and co-edited Poetry Durham from 1982 to 1994. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 1983 for his poetry and a Cholmondeley Award for Poets in 1990. His four previous collections of poems are The Stripped Bed (Collins Harvill, 1990), Wheel (Arc, 2008), Gangs of Shadow (Arc, 2014) and Return of the Gift (Arc, 2018). Michael O'Neill died in December 2018, leaving a wife and two children.
