Preparations for Departure

Nathanael O'Reilly

Preparations for Departure
Format
Paperback
Publisher
UWA Publishing
Country
Australia
Published
1 May 2017
Pages
100
ISBN
9781742589459

Preparations for Departure

Nathanael O'Reilly

Joseph Brodsky, the Russian Nobel laureate, once remarked that memory and art have in common the ‘ability to select, a taste for detail.’ In the work of Nathanael O'Reilly, memory and art come together to bring us poems that remember what cannot
- what must not
- be forgotten, in rich and telling detail and with a taste for quiet but incisive irony. ~ Paul Kane

The poems in this transnational, cosmopolitan collection traverse fourteen countries, from Australia, the poet’s homeland, to the United States, his place of residence, making stops in ancestral homelands Ireland and England, passing through continental Europe and the Middle East. O'Reilly’s poetry continually crosses both visible and invisible borders, excavating landscapes and the local, belonging and unbelonging, cross-cultural exchanges, expatriation, globalisation, exile, identity, youth, loss, relationships, ageing, and death. The speakers in the poems are often in motion or making preparations for departure, unwilling and unable to remain static, always eager to explore.

Nathanael O'Reilly’s poems sound the major themes of Australian poetry: landscape, displacement, yearning, and above all a critique of cultural narrowness. O'Reilly’s plain-spoken diction is often laced with understated wit, but is given ballast by its principled grounding in lived experience.

~ Nicholas Birns

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