On Water

'On Water' is Irish poet and fiction writer John O'Donnell's third collection of poems and explores what are very much the universal themes of exile, love, sex and death. Alive to the present and the past, these confidently built, expansive poems resist generalisation to instead focus - often in startling ways - on the intimate, particular detail: a mother's panic at the beach; the stench of an industrial school; a slave-trader's one good eye. O'Donnell's ability to link and interweave myth, history and family and personal life results in poems that exert a considerable pull on both the reader's heartstrings and intelligence.