O'DRISCOLL, Dennis

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Nationality: Irish. Born: Thurles, County Tipperary, 1 January 1954. Education: Christian Brothers' Schools, Thurles; Institute of Public Administration, Dublin, 1971–72, certificate in public administration 1972; University College, Dublin, 1972–75. Family: Married Julie O'Callaghan in 1985. Career: Executive officer, 1970–76, higher executive officer, 1976–83; since 1983, assistant principal officer, Revenue Commissioners, Dublin. Member of council, Irish United Nations Association, 1975–80; literary organizer, Dublin Arts Festival, 1977–79; editor, Poetry Ireland Review, Dublin, 1986–87; writer-in-residence, University College, Dublin, 1987. Awards: Irish Arts Council bursary, 1985, 1996. Address: c/o International Customs Branch, Castle House, South Great George's Street, Dublin 2, Ireland.

Publications

Poetry

Kist. Portlaoise, Dolmen Press, 1982.

Hidden Extras. Dublin, Dedalus Press, and London, Anvil Press Poetry, 1987.

Five Irish Poets, with others. Fredonia, White Pine Press, and Dublin, Dedalus Press, 1990.

Long Story Short. London, Anvil Press Poetry, and Dublin, Dedalus Press, 1993.

The Bottom Line. Dublin, Dedalus Press, 1994.

Quality Time. London, Anvil Press Poetry, and Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, Dufour, 1997.

Weather Permitting. London, Anvil Press Poetry, 1999.

Other

Editor, with Peter Fallon, The First Ten Years: Dublin Arts Festival Poetry. Dublin, Dublin Arts Festival, 1979.

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Critical Studies: "A Poet Hits His Stride" by Seamus Heaney, in the Sunday Tribune (Dublin), 19 September 1982; "O'Driscoll's Finest Poetry" by Bernard O'Donoghue, in Irish Literary Supplement (New York), 2(2), 1983; "Laughter from Drab Normality" by Brendan Kennelly, in the Sunday Tribune (Dublin), 2 August 1987; "The Modern Order" by Steven Matthews, in Times Literary Supplement (London), 1 October 1993; "Mortician Discovers Lyric Grace" by Peter Sirr, in Irish Literary Supplement (New York), 13(1), 1994.

Dennis O'Driscoll comments:

The primary impulse behind my early poetry was a sense of bewilderment, sometimes bordering on disbelief, at the human condition: the tenuous hold we have on life, the humiliations and uncertainties experienced during that life, and the degradations of illness and death. Thematically the work has broadened; stylistically it has become less raw, with an increased irony and black humor. Themes occurring more frequently include some associated with the monotonous routines involved in earning a living. The poems are written out of—though not necessarily about—personal experiences: the early deaths of my parents; the office job I have held since I was 16.

I like to use the most economic language possible in my poetry, unless the theme prompts otherwise. In this respect I have learned a great deal from the east European poets, about whom I have written a considerable amount of critical prose. A concise style is also appropriate to a life that is dominated by nonliterary demands and that allows time only for the writing of those poems that insist forcefully on being committed to the page.

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Dennis O'Driscoll was known in Ireland as a reviewer of poetry, particularly in the now defunct periodical Hibernia and in the Sunday Tribune, which it metamorphosed into, before his own poetry became well known. Indeed, he can claim the distinction of having preached the virtues of major cosmopolitan poets, both in eastern Europe and elsewhere, some time before they were much attended to in England: writers such as Brecht as poet, Miroslav Holub, and Les Murray, as well as neglected English and Scottish poets such as W.S. Graham, George Mackay Brown, and John Whitworth. He was a maker of reputations at a remarkably early age (before he was twenty-five), with a notably discriminating eye.

When O'Driscoll's first volume, Kist, was published in 1982 (the poet was twenty-eight), its virtues were to some extent those of the widely read reviewer. There were far-ranging references to modern writers—Holub, Kafka, Pasternak, Vinokurov-as well as expert poems in various genres of lyric, mostly of an imagist kind. But what was much more striking was an insistent consistency of theme, indicated by the volume's archaizing title (meaning "coffin" as well as the Elizabethan "kissed," as in "Farewell unkist!") and by the cover illustration, Munch's The Kiss of Death. The book is dominated by mortality, an imaginative fixation suggested by the early deaths of O'Driscoll's parents, first his mother of cancer and his father very shortly afterward. But the theme is carried with an extraordinary, paradoxical energy. Even while the insistent pathology threatens to become stifling, the immediacy of the plain language is focused on the physical elements of life while they are being lost. This is most evident in the poem "Someone," which has attained some celebrity:

someone is dressing up for death today, a change
  of skirt or tie...
shaving his face to marble for the last laying-out
spraying with deodorant her coarse armpit grass...
someone's thighs will not be streaked with elastic in the
  future...
someone's coffin is being sanded, laminated, shined …

Universality is lightly suggested by the crossing of gender, and the sensual tactility of everyday life is made desirable by its ephemerality. This meeting of the quotidian and the transcendent is O'Driscoll's hallmark, seen in several short poems on death and illness, as in the title poem and in "Thalidomide," where the last word is a masterstroke of satiric protest at the President of the Immortals,

whose hands a neighbour cannot find
to press inside the customary shilling of luck.

O'Driscoll often reminds us with grim humor that his professional work is concerned with death duties in the Irish civil service. Perhaps it is this that enables him to make death no more than an event like any other, an Irish attitude in the tradition running from Swift to Beckett. In a review of O'Driscoll's second book, Hidden Extras, Brendan Kennelly made the illuminating suggestion—surprising at first blush—that "O'Driscoll has the makings of a deeply comic poet," comic, that is, in the way in which Beckett is. (We might remember that this lugubrious literature has, after all, been called "the Irish comic tradition.") The dominance of the funereal by the witty in the second book is indicated by the cover illustration, in the Irish edition, by Peter Brookes, a grim variation on Wittgenstein's duck-rabbit—a skull that is also a mouse smoking a cigarette. Although the liking for imagist conciseness is still evident, as in the series called "Breviary," for example, the typical O'Driscoll poem is now more discursive. It is a catalogue that extends on the model of "Someone," which reappears as the last poem here among a small group of poems from Kist, or a narrative that extends through the simple exposition of its details.

What is impressive in O'Driscoll's later work is still the evocation of the everyday with an observant, unpatronizing eye. Compassion is suggested without sentiment or irony in poems about people at work or the poet's family or locality. The range and unlabored humor of the poems are suggested by the title "Thurles after Zbigniew Herbert," marrying the parochial with the cosmopolitan. O'Driscoll's admiration for Brecht is recalled frequently in the way patent and artless narratives are invested with meaning. But he is very much of his age and country in the unflinching way he treats mortality with humor, at the furthest remove from disgust. That his view of the human condition is essentially positive is unmistakable, as in "Spoiled Child," reminiscent of Lamb's "Dream Children," or in "Declan at Twenty," to his brother:

     On blustery days, I wonder if the wind is with or against
you as you cycle there, along unsheltered miles....

—Bernard O'Donoghue