Here Nor There

Author: Bernard, O'Donoghue,

Literature & literary studies

Published on 7 January 1999 by Vintage Publishing (Chatto & Windus) in the United Kingdom.

Bernard O'Donoghue's third collection of poetry is a book about the middle ground- being in between two places, being neither here nor there. Once more mining the memories of his rural upbringing in County Cork, O'Donoghue weaves through the collection a series of tender elegies for the characters and places of his youth. The poems are touched with a quiet mourning, not only for a passing age, but for a homeland to which the author no longer truly belongs. In the words of John Burnside, O'Donoghue wrights with 'scrupulous honesty' challenging 'our pretended knowledge of the world'. His position of not quite belonging gives him an outsider's scepticism and this verse, which captures in its metre the careful movement of thought and the rhythms of storytelling, chips away at certainties and reaches towards a tentative understanding.