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Among other characteristics Seamus Heaney treasured Dennis O’Driscoll’s ‘acuity as a critic’. The Outnumbered Poet, an extensive selection of Dennis O’ Driscoll’s prose writings — critical, biographical and autobiographical — succeeds his much-praised Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams (The Gallery Press, 2001).
Opening on a personal note, it includes astute and incisive essays and reviews, encompassing poets as diverse as Anna Kamienska and Billy Collins, and surveying the work of major practitioners such as R S Thomas, Czeslaw Milosz and Yehuda Amichai. There are perceptive readings of the poetry with vivid and telling accounts of meetings with the poets themselves.
Drawing on his encyclopaedic knowledge of the Nobel laureate’s oeuvre, the book also offers in-depth considerations of Seamus Heaney’s writings, and — among several previously unpublished essays — a ground-breaking overview of the life and poetry of Ireland’s poète maudit, Michael Hartnett.
Immensely readable, eloquent and often witty, this treasure trove demonstrates the broad church of an indispensable advocate’s thinking.
‘The Outnumbered Poet is a master class on how to read poetry. For those Creative Writing students cutting their teeth on the ‘plastic bones of great poems’ and indeed all fans of poetry and Dennis O’Driscoll in particular, I whole-heartedly recommend these essays. O’Driscoll always says more than can be absorbed in one reading. He bemoans in the ‘Library of Adventure’ – ‘no book is ever finished, only abandoned’. I’m not finished with this book but it was only by abandoning it that I could find the time to write this review.’ — Martina Evans, Wales Arts Review
