The Sea Cabinet

Caitríona O’Reilly’s poetry is remarkable for its precise observation of the natural world. Her second collection, The Sea Cabinet, broadens that clear-sighted vision in poems also haunted by history, consolidating the achievement of her prizewinning début volume, The Nowhere Birds. Her title-poem conjures the vanished world of the whaling industry, and serves as a starting-point for other acute meditations on natural and cultural obsolescence. Yet the habitual concerns of the lyric self are present too, in poems which enact the dilemmas and anxieties of the individual amidst a rapidly changing environment. The Sea Cabinet was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. Caitríona O’Reilly’s first collection The Nowhere Birds won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, given for the best book by any new Irish writer published in 2001. Her third collection Geis won the Irish Times Poetry Now Award 2016.