Introducing.......

Sunfire is the glow of a sunset caught in the evening sky. When I was a boy, at home in Roscommon, I thought hell was burning out of control somewhere over the Galway Road. The word sunfire was given to me just in time to use it as the title for my first collection which was published by the Dedalus Press in 1997.  It was built on an earlier unpublished collection that came third in the The Patrick Kavanagh Award back in1994.

Nowadays I have a limited view of the evening sky. Living in Dublin, for years now, I still miss that big expanse of sky in the kitchen window. Different times of the year bring longings for scenes remembered from Roscommon: harvest moons, autumn ground fogs, a stand of primroses, the view behind our house when the frost was down.Those memories crop up in my new collection,Turn Your Head, also from Dedalus. But the poems range much wider and farther afield than that: love,death, religion, war and a  series of poems based on the Cambodian death camp,Tuol Sleng, are among the subjects.

This website includes poems from Sunfire and  a selection from Turn Your Head All the poems on this website have been published previously; acknowledgements are due to Poetry Ireland Review, Cyphers, Out To Lunch Anthology, West 47, 

Michael O'Dea, May, 2006