Life
1968- ; b. Newry, Co. Down; The History of Rain (1993), winner
of Patrick Kavanagh Award; Arts held Council bursaries in 1990 and 1994;
m. Vona Groarke and winner with Groarke of the Rooney Prize Special Award
in the 20th Year of the prize, 1996; made television documentary on cricket
in Ireland; reviews poetry for Times Literary Supplement; Seatown
(Gallery 1999), 61pp.; lives in Dundalk; placed second in Blackwell
Poetry Competition, 2002.
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Works
‘The State of Poetry’, Krino, Gerald Dawe and Jonathan
Williams, eds., special issue (Winter 1993), pp.51-52 [‘The best
Irish poets still seem those who work to solidify a unique voice, and
their best poems are those which attempt, in vain, to pull that voice
apart.’]; ‘The Middle Ground’, poem in Times Literary
Supplement (22 March 2002).
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Criticism
Ian Gregson, review of The History of Rain (Gallery 1993),
in Times Literary Supplement (23 Sept.1994), [q.p.]; ’the collisions
that occur in the work of Conor O’Callaghan are not so much between
cultures as between fact and fantasy, history and memory, experience and
representation. He has clearly learned from the example of Paul Muldoon
in the way he summons up a notion of the real but at the same time interrogates
it with the hypothetical or the fabulatory, but what is remarkable is
that such a young poet is the extent to which he has assimilated all this
sophistication and made something of his own out of it. Title poem describes
how poets great-uncle Johnny MacCabe and MacCabe’s mother experienced
the late summer of rain of 1940, or the gap between that experience and
how O’Callaghan imagines it. [&c.] Notes use of borders (e.g.,
‘suddenly uncertain at the border of an even longer decade’);
finds in O’Callaghan’s poems the lived experience of succeeding
generations; concludes that postmodernism in Britain and Ireland is in
a fruitful dialogue with realism.
Peter Sirr, review of The History of Rain, in Irish Literary Supplement (Fall 1994): ‘thoughtfully constructed and unfussily articulated blocks of reflection’.
Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)