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.