Geis

By Caitríona O'Reilly

'Geis' is a word from Irish mythology meaning a supernatural taboo or injunction on behaviour. In her long-awaited third collection, Caitriona 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 Caitriona O'Reilly's third collection, following 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 shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. 'An exploration of disturbance and alienation'O'Reilly can be among the best we have' - Fiona Sampson, The Irish Times, on The Sea Cabinet. 'The most startlingly accomplished debut collection by any Irish poet since Paul Muldoon's New Weather in 1973' - Patrick Crotty, The Irish Times, on The Nowhere Birds. 'Whether enthralled or appalled, she beholds and magnifies the world and its strange creatures (including ourselves) in poems that are formally versatile and linguistically copious' - Michael Longley. Poetry Book Society Recommendation

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: May 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781780372143

Book preview

Ovum

You’d take it for zero, or nothing,

or the spotless oval your lips make saying it,

as if you blew both yolk and albumen

through its pin-pricked head: the meat

of the word made orotund and Latinate.

It’s like putting your mouth to the smooth

breast of the ocarina, from oca, the goose,

hooting out its fledgling notes.

Unless you seal the gap it’s left, they’ll fall

out, those other o-words, like bubbles

streaming through a soapy blow-hole:

from oblation and obloquy to oxlip and ozone,

and that sneaky Trojan obol,

coin-shaped, it’s true, but spawned

from the spiky Greek of obelus,

the death-mark, dagger or crucifix,

as phallic and obvious, now that you say it,

as that double o in spermatozoon,

which enters by its own locomotion –

the flagellum, its tiny whip and scourge.

Island

1   Mirror

I recognised her in your eyes,

that way you have of keeping separate,

aware that to wake is to weigh the damage.

From the shore of my own island I