Friday, February 21, 2020

Thinking Alone


I'm proud to announce the upcoming release of my new book, Thinking Alone: Poems of Solitary Reflection, which will be published by Horizon Press at the beginning of April.

It's an anthology of poems with this in common: that all of them feature a character in solitude, in a particular place and time, thinking. A commentary is given on each poem, as well as a fifteen-page introduction by myself.

The collected poems include:

Snow by Louis MacNeice
Lines Written on Westminster Bridge by William Wordsworth.
Adelstrop by Edward Thomas
Church Going by Philip Larkin
A Prayer for my Daughter by W.B. Yeats
Thoughts in a Garden by Andrew Marvell
A Box in the Attic by Dirk Benedict
Night Thoughts by Dr. Edward Young (exerpts)
Elegy in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray
The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy
Iniskeen Road: July Evening by Patrick Kavanagh
Mirror in February by Thomas Kinsella

From the Introduction:


"John Stuart Mill wrote that 'the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet's utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude'. Whether or not that is true as a general description of poetry-- and I think there is an argument to be made that it is-- it is certainly true of the poems in this anthology."

Praise for Thinking Alone:

"If you can't sit alone in an armchair and enjoy this anthology, you are a hopeless extrovert". Charles Slaughter, poetry critic, The Sussex Review

"Both old favourites and joyous new discoveries may be met with in this intriguingly-premised volume...Ó Ceallaigh might be said to have discovered, not a new genre of poetry, but one that has existed for centuries" Kate Culleton, Auckland Tribune

"Meditation, memory, self-questioning, self-doubt, nostalgia, melancholy, epiphany.... these pages brim over with the poetic dividends of solitude." Roger De Sousa, The Poetry Lover blog.

2 comments:

  1. The first two people mentioned don't seem to exist, having googled them, and neither do their publications apparently. Might be no harm to ask your publisher for evidence of these journals.

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  2. I can think of someone straight away who'd be interested,unfortunately her birthday's in March,but I can work out an occasion later

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