These vigorous poems tackle the world head-on, questioning our perception of what is real and what is mere fabrication. In scenes snatched from personal relationships, from popular culture, the internet and religion, O'Dwyer displays a timeless creative sensibility expressed through a twenty-first century voice.

Eileen Sheehan

In Edward O’Dwyer’s second poetry collection, we find astute and betimes piercing images of love and loneliness, loss and finitude, as well as humour, tenderness, and satirical shafts against social follies and general daftness. Here I see a poet from a younger generation finding steady feet on the same road that poets have trod mightily in the past, the scenic route to epiphany.

Ciaran O’Driscoll

In his first acclaimed poetry collection, The Rain on Cruise’s Street, Edward O’Dwyer writes “[t]hings are always changing, this is something you’ll see.” The line is a harbinger of things to come in this new collection filled with the swirl of the personal and historical. These are poems that speak of desire for and estrangement from the beloved and the beloved country. The tension between the ecstatic and horrific that O’Dwyer evokes in these poems is precisely why I turn to poetry: His vision of Ireland grants me the courage to see from the vantage point of any country and history I inhabit.

Sandy Yannone

Edward O'Dwyer

Edward O’Dwyer is a secondary school teacher, poet and fiction writer from Limerick, Ireland. He has published three collections of poetry with Salmon, most recently Exquisite Prisons which appeared in 2022. It followed The Rain on Cruise’s Street (2014), which was Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes, and Bad News, Good News, Bad News (2017), which contains the poem, ‘The Whole History of Dancing’, winner of the Best Original Poem award from Eigse Michael Hartnett Festival 2018. He has represented Ireland at Poesiefestival, Berlin, for their European ‘renshi’ project. He took part in Poetry Ireland’s Introductions Series, and has been shortlisted for a Hennessy Award for Emerging Poetry. His first short story collection, Cheat Sheets, was published by Truth Serum Press in 2018 and features on The Lonely Crowd journal’s ‘Best Books of 2018’ list. His poems and stories have been published in journals and anthologies around the world, both digitally and in print. He is the current Poet Laureate of Adare, Limerick, named by Poetry Ireland as part of their Poetry Town initiative.

His

for Noel King

He looked for emptiness in his life

because this had become the fashionable thing.

Everyone was getting their own emptiness.

It was all the neighbours could talk about,

comparing the gaping voids of their souls

like salaries or new cars.

You were nobody without one,

as celebrities fought for the headlines

of magazines and newspapers and websites

specialising in emptiness,

plumbing the depths of the hollow place in their selves

for all the world looking on.

On Facebook, his friends

were all posting updates about their emptiness.

A mate of a mate

uploaded a picture of his emptiness

and it has over fifty ‘likes’ already.

He didn’t look far or long

before finding it, an emptiness of his own,

an emptiness he could be proud of.

An emptiness he could show the world

without shame.

Enough to get lost in,

and get lost he did.

More than he could ever have filled

with the love of a good woman

or a life of good deeds or honest work.

An emptiness he could spend the rest

of his life searching through

and discovering all the nothing

he could ever dream

and then some.

Prayer