‘We see the span of Dermot Bolger’s lyric sensibility – from young and tender nature songs that reach to encompass the drama of the new estates and to find room for the wounded and broken, right up to songs of experience where a maturity of vision matches a maturity of style. A canny and uncanny selection: how crucial to the novels and the plays the poet in him has been comes clear here; how faithful he’s stayed to his people comes clear; how much honour he’s paid to their struggles comes clear; how much love has animated his work comes crystal clear.’
− Paula Meehan, Ireland Professor of Poetry
Although one of Ireland’s best known novelists and playwrights, Dermot Bolger has always been first and foremost a poet. This volume of selected poems celebrates his finest poetry written over forty years, from 1970s teenage poems up to his 2012 acclaimed The Venice Suite: A Voyage Through Loss, and including previously unpublished new work.
On a public level it charts a poet’s passionate engagement with Irish society. Yet on a private level it is deeply intimate, charting the author’s life in poems described by Paul Durcan as ‘pure poetry. The saddest, truthfullest poetry you can imagine. Poetry at its lyric limits.’
That Which is Suddenly Precious reveals the full extent of Bolger’s achievement as a poet.
Reviews
‘Poet and author Dermot Bolger has captured the extraordinary amid the ordinary in city life’ – Irish Independent
‘Bolger’s poems are often autobiographical: each poem in the book is dated and they testify to a well-lived life. Good-humoured and observant… they stay close to the city of which he has become a kind of unofficial laureate’ – Irish Times
The title of Dermot Bolger’s latest anthology of new and selected poetry, That Which is Suddenly Precious, is self-explanatory. His sense of place – Finglas in north Dublin, the city of Dublin that he clearly loves, the town of Wexford – have shone through all his work and are evinced here again, with sometimes a single word or phrase encapsulating a small universe.’ – Deirdre Purcell, Irish Independent
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