Critically acclaimed and award-winning poet Micheal O'Siadhail's Desire is a quartet of poems which addresses the pressing global concerns of our times. He describes the devastating effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, how it spread worldwide paralyzing our society and instilled daily fear of death, particularly in older people. Hospitals were unable to cope, restaurants and businesses were closing, workers laid off, schools and universities taught remotely, and few weddings or funerals could take place throughout a pandemic which he sees as ultimately reflecting our relationship to the damaged environment and to climate change. The current ecological crisis is rooted in new reckless patterns of rapacity which threaten our habitat as our flawed stewardship has led to global warming, heatwaves, raging fires, and hurricanes. Still, we fail to curb our greed. Our need for comfort, convenience, and instant communication on the internet, which began as an idealistic dream of making knowledge universal, has resulted in an overconsumption that further harms our planet, a consumerism driven by algorithms and internet surveillance. It is time to regain a more modest perspective on our part in the natural world and learn again to be better forebears for the generations to come, responsible stewards of the earth we share. A greater sense of our role as humble, trusted custodians can free us for wonder and praise and allow us to re-find sources of meaning worthy of life-enhancing desires. O'Siadhail affirms with realism, imagination, and inspiring wisdom how our human desires and longings can open up ways through our unprecedented global challenges.

Testament is an imaginative improvisation on the Bible that engages with the intensities, the ups and downs, of existence in our complex and fragmented world. Psalter, the first part, comprises 150 psalm-like poems that sound the depths and heights of life lived in the presence of God. Here, shaped into powerful, accessible poetry, is the wisdom of a mature and practical faith that knows love, grief, doubt, fear, disappointment, and overwhelming delight and joy. Micheal O'Siadhail stretches heart, mind, and imagination to open up profound questions of God, suffering and aging, truth and trust, freedom and surprise, desire and love. There are passionate exchanges with God and daring leaps of insight. Through them all runs a gripping conversational relationship expressed in praise, thanks, lament, and distilled wisdom, embracing a dazzling variety of forms and rhythms. Gospel, the second part, retells in poetry stories from the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The emphasis is on the plain sense of the stories, newly imagined. We are invited to reread them, to discover insights and nuances, angles and depths, and above all to encounter afresh the familiar yet endlessly mysterious central character-Jesus. The world's bestselling book shows yet again its capacity to excite and inspire. O'Siadhail's acclaimed The Five Quintets engaged with the ways in which the arts, economics, politics, the sciences, philosophy, and theology have shaped our twenty-first-century world. Here in Testament is an imaginative faith and wise spirituality that can inspire day-to-day living in that world, revealed through the inner life and penetrating discernment of a great poet.

This comparative overview of modern Irish dialects surveys the phonology, morphology and syntext of the various dialects and contains a wealth of empirical data organized in an accessible way for the nonspecialist.

The Five Quintets is both poetry and cultural history. It offers a sustained reflection on modernityapeople and movementsain poetic meter. Just as Dante, in his Divine Comedy , summed up the Middle Ages on the cusp of modernity, The Five Quintets takes stock of a late modern world on the cusp of the first-ever global century. Celebrated Irish poet Micheal O'Siadhail structures his Quintets to echo the Comedy . Where Dante had a tripartite structure ( Inferno , Purgatorio , and Paradiso ), O'Siadhail has a five-part structure, with each quintet devoted to a disciplineathe arts; economics; politics; science; and philosophy and theology. Each quintet is also marked by a different form: sonnets interspersed by haikus ("saikus"), iambic pentameter, terza rima, and two other invented forms. The Five Quintets captivates even as it instructs, exploring the ever-changing flow of ideas and the individuals whose contributions elicited change and reflected their times. The artists, economists, politicians, scientists, and philosophers O'Siadhail features lived complex lives, often full of contradictions. Others, though deeply rooted in their context, transcended their time and place and pointed beyond themselvesaeven to us and to a time after modernity's reign. The ancient Horace commended literature that delivered "profit with delight." In The Five Quintets , Micheal O'Siadhail has done just that: he delights us in the present with his artistry, even as he reveals hidden treasures of our past and compels us toward the future.

For twenty years Micheal O'Siadhail's beloved wife, Brid, suffered from Parkinson's disease. These love poems chronicle the last two years of her life, her death and his grief. In Love Life, now available again in his Collected Poems, he told their story of over three decades of marriage. In this sonnet sequence their love faces illness and death and sounds the depths of parting. There is a tenderness, intensity and gratitude which will resonate with those who know both love and loss.

The Five Quintets is a mammoth poetic adventure undertaken by the celebrated poet Micheal O'Siadhail, representing the culmination of an extraordinary life's work. The project is vast in scope, attempting nothing less than an exploration of the predicaments of Western modernity. Drawing on inspiration from T S Eliot's Four Quartets, The Five Quintets brings the premise of Dante's Divine Comedy into the current day. As Dante explored humanity though mythical characters, O'Siadhail focuses on the humanity of the creators of today's dreams of perfection: scientists, artists, economists, politicians, politics, and philosophers and theologians from the past speak with each other in this extraordinarily imaginative work. The result is an unparalleled book of instruction for a troubled age. The Five Quintets retrieves and exhibits human gifts our own age may have lost to create a work `whose pulse draws us to love. A book of poetry in the category of the epic, the encyclopedic, and the sacred.' (Peter Ochs, Professor of Judaic Studies, Virginia).

Celebrated poet Micheal O'Siadhail knows desire, love, trust, and wonder. He also intimately knows sorrow, suffering, tragedy, and loss. His life and his poetry have always yearned for meaning and virtue despite, and in the midst of, life's pain. This collection of poems, spanning four decades and drawing upon thirteen smaller collections, works both head and heart toward a mature and seasoned wisdom. The poems are not only richly personal, plumbing the depths of marriage, friendship, vocation, and grief, but they also engage with what matters most in culture and societyamusic, language, city life, and the dynamics of history. O'Siadhail's roots may be deeply Irish, but his poetry speaks for and to all.

Celebrated poet Micheal O'Siadhail knows desire, love, trust, and wonder. He also intimately knows sorrow, suffering, tragedy, and loss. His life and his poetry have always yearned for meaning and virtue despite, and in the midst of, life's pain. This collection of poems, spanning four decades and drawing upon thirteen smaller collections, works both head and heart toward a mature and seasoned wisdom. The poems are not only richly personal, plumbing the depths of marriage, friendship, vocation, and grief, but they also engage with what matters most in culture and societyamusic, language, city life, and the dynamics of history. O'Siadhail's roots may be deeply Irish, but his poetry speaks for and to all.

For twenty years,celebrated poet Micheal O'Siadhail's beloved wife, BrA d, suffered from Parkinson's disease. O'Siadhail's verses explore the ordinary triumph of human fidelity and sound the depths of parting through a 150-sonnet sequence in which love faces wasting illness and the specter of death. There is tenderness, intensity,and gratitudeawhich will resonate with allwho know both love and loss.

Micheal O'Siadhail knows desire, love, trust and wonder, while at the same time facing suffering, tragedy and loss. His life has always been a yearning for meaning, and these four decades of poems work both head and heart towards a ripe wisdom. They are not only richly personal - marriage, friendship, vocation, grief - but also engage with what matters in culture and society - music, language, city life and the dynamics of history. His deep roots are Irish but O'Siadhail's scope is global. This is life lived to the full with jazz-like leaps and let-go where classical forms and variations make for playful freedom and innovation. His Collected Poems draws on thirteen collections, and includes a CD of him reading a selection of poems.