Micheal O'Siadhail

Micheal O'Siadhail ( ; born 12 January 1947) is an Irish poet. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin (TCD) and the University of Oslo. He has been a lecturer at TCD, a professor at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, and has been a full-time writer since 1987. He has received several awards, including the Irish American Culture Institute Prize for Poetry in 1982, the Marten Toonder Prize for Literature in 1998, and the Eric Hoffer Book Award in 2020.

At age twelve, O'Siadhail attended the Jesuit boarding school Clongowes Wood College, an experience he later described in his poetry. At age thirteen, he visited the Aran Islands, an experience he stated had a significant impact on him.

Career

Micheal O'Siadhail studied at Trinity College Dublin from 1964 to 1984, where his teachers included notable authors David H. Greene and Máirtín Ó Cadhain. There he was elected a Scholar of the College and received a First Class Honours degree. His circle at Trinity included David McConnell, Mary Robinson, and David F. Ford. O'Siadhail then received a government exchange scholarship, going on to study folklore and Icelandic at the University of Oslo. He considers Scandinavian literature a major influence on his work.

O'Siadhail worked in academia for seventeen years, first as a lecturer at Trinity College Dublin (1969–1973), where he was awarded an MLitt in 1971, and then as a research professor at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. During these years, he gave named lectures in Dublin, as well as at Harvard University and Yale University. As an academic, O'Siadhail published his works on the linguistics of Irish and a textbook for learners of Irish. He was a visiting professor at the University of Iceland from 1982 until 1987 when he resigned from his professorship to write poetry.

He was a member of the Arts Council of the Republic of Ireland (1987–1993) and a member of the Advisory Committee on Cultural Relations (1989–1997). He was an editor of the Poetry Ireland Review and the founding chairman of ILE (Ireland Literature Exchange). A founding member of Aosdána (Academy of Distinguished Irish Artists), O'Siadhail has worked with composer Seóirse Bodley and painters Cecil King and Mick O'Dea. In 2008, he gave a reading as part of a celebration for Brian Friel's 80th birthday.

He represented Ireland at the Poetry Society's European Poetry Festival in London in 1981 and the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1997. He was a Writer in Residence at the Yeats Summer School in 1991 and at the University of British Columbia in 2002.

Poetic Development

O'Siadhail's poetic works can be organized into two main periods: his "apprenticeship" (from 1980-1985, during which his first five volumes appeared), followed by his mature period, which occurs after his 1987 decision to resign his professorship and devote his energies to poetry full-time.

Apprenticeship

O'Siadhail's first three collections were written in Irish: An Bhlian Bhisigh [The Leap Year] (1978); Runga [Rungs of Time] (1980) and Cumann [Belonging] (1982). These collections explore themes that recur in his later work. In Belonging, human relationships emerge as a major theme.

His next two collections, Springnight (1983) and The Image Wheel (1985), were English-language works. They introduced poems that became well-known before he began a series of books based on broad themes.

Maturity

O'Siadhail described his third collection in English, 1990's The Chosen Garden, as "an effort to face my own journey, to comprehend and trace one's own tiny epic." The ten poems collected in The Chosen Garden recount, from his early-middle-aged perspective, the poet's early life and development, particularly his experiences at Clongowes. While he included sonnets in Springnight and The Image Wheel, in The Chosen Garden O'Siadhail composes sonnet sequences, shifting between Shakepearean and Italian forms, heightening each sequence's "shift in argument."

In 1992, Hail! Madam Jazz: New and Selected Poems appeared, which includes the sequence "The Middle Voice." Named the best poetry collection of 1992 by the Dublin Sunday Tribune, it was the first of his collections to be published in North America. A Fragile City, a meditation in four parts on the theme of trust, was published in 1995. His 1998 Our Double Time addresses themes related to human finitude. The Times Literary Supplement praised the collection's "fine poems about music." In 2002, he published The Gossamer Wall, which was shortlisted for the 2003 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize's fiction category. In 2005, he published Love Life, followed by Globe in 2007. O'Siadhail's poetry often explores themes of love, loss, and the human condition, and features engagement with cultural and historical subjects.

Personal life In 1970, he married Bríd Ní Chearbhaill, who was born in Gweedore in County Donegal and worked as a teacher. They were married for 44 years until Ní Chearbhaill died in 2013. After her death, O’Siadhail moved to New York. He is now married to Christina Weltz, an assistant professor of surgical oncology at Mount Sinai Hospital.