Reality Check

Dennis O’Driscoll

Dennis O’Driscoll is one of Ireland’s most popular poets and critics. In Reality Check, his first book of poetry published in the United States, he strips away Irish stereotypes with sly wit, candor, and an ear attuned to the tragedies and comedies of a globalized Ireland. Visions of a “donkey-cart-to-creamery age that no longer / dares to speak its shabby name” are interspersed with the language of modern life and business. His job as a civil servant for nearly forty years—”a lifetime’s fug of arbitrations, ordinances, inter-agency liaison”—made him privy to the world of bureaucracy and office politics and gave him a knack for transforming poetry’s themes through “workaday words” and present-day concerns.

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ISBN: 9781556592805

Format: Paperback

The Call

When we call on God, we always find him out,
away on business maybe, lost in a world of his own,
performing miracles for distant universes, volunteering
to undergo humiliation all over again on another planet’s
equivalent of a cross to which his credulous disciples
nail their colours as a drowning man clings to a mast.

He is otherwise engaged perpetually—lines busy;
no menu of options offering access to the top—
his supplicants fobbed off with white-collar staff,
parochial-minded men handling his clients like constituents;
clerical workers undertaking to pass on petitions, insisting
the final decisions fall totally outside their sphere.

We are disillusioned by this failure to meet us face-
to-face, his abdication from fair play when all we ask
is mercy for patients sweltering feverishly through blue
surgical gowns, a softening of his line on chronic pain,
repeal of whatever law ordains that those dealt a poor
hand must suffer the consequences for life, a birth scar.

Is it conceivable that he still dotes on the very hairs
of our sceptical heads, eavesdrops on every arbitrary
phrase, like some benign celestial Nicolae Ceausescu?
Or is he no longer on speaking terms with mankind,
dismissive of the species as a bad day’s work, leading
his campaign trail to more docile outposts of his empire?

Has he ceased believing in his mission statement, lost faith
in his epoch-creating role? Can this universe have spun out
of his control, his conglomerate diversified so much that
a personal touch, a hands-on customer service, is unviable?
We want him to summon a mass gathering like an extraordinary
meeting of shareholders, feed facts to the multitudes this time.

If he has died, where are the oozing wounds to which our doubting
fingers can be applied? What are the chances he may rise again?
Once, his beatific smile graced all our houses like an ancestral
photograph or the graven image of a charismatic president or king.
Now the blanched patch left in its place must be brushed out,
the wall painted over, a hall mirror found to occupy that space.

About the Author

Dennis O’Driscoll was born in Thurles, North Tipperary, Ireland, in 1954. He published nine books of poetry, a collection of essays, and the anthology Quote Poet Unquote: Contemporary Quotations on Poets and Poetry (Copper Canyon Press, 2008). His first book of poetry to appear in the United States was Reality Check (Copper Canyon Press, 2008). O’Driscoll received many honors for his work, including a Lannan Literary Award in 1999, the 2005 E.M. Forster Award, and the 2006 O’Shaughnessy Award for …

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Reviews

“Dennis O’Driscoll has produced an extraordinary body of work… Some of his poems have already achieved the status of classics.” —Poetry Ireland Review

“O’Driscoll’s mind… ruminates on experience with alacrity, humility, and an unwillingness to pontificate. His talent—which could equally grace a novel—should stand the test of time.” —Poetry Review

“His terrain is, in effect, without borders: mordant, open, sharp, generous, and sad.” —The Guardian

“[O’Driscoll’s] poems dance deftly on the tongue… The collection offers a cornucopia of visual and aural delights, a Whitmanic appreciation of both nature and human creation that nevertheless recognizes the global dangers posed by the latter… O’Driscoll’s US debut is a bracing introduction to a poet whose work American readers have gone without for too long.” —Library Journal