Seatown

‘An extraordinarily mature and exact voice which promises really great things . . .’
–– Adam Thorpe, The Observer

‘There is good humour . . . as well as a sly intelligence, and the whole package of wit has a musicality which makes it memorable . . .’
–– Robert Nye, The Times (London)

Few first collections receive the critical praise accorded to Conor O’Callaghan’s The History of Rain.

Seatown, its remarkable successor, centres around a cluster of poems which draws upon the oldest section of the poet’s home town, Dundalk. They offer at once an unblinkered view of the everyday reality of that place and an unqualified hymn to its rundown charms. Other poems range from the tongue-in-cheek polemics of ‘East’ to the more expansive lyricism of ‘Slip’. Whether obliquely narrative, formally innovative or sensually explicit, Seatown more than justifies that early praise.