Many of O Riordain’s poems came out of his struggle with the isolation, guilt and loneliness of life in mid-century Catholic Ireland experienced in Cork, the native locale also of the poet Greg Delanty, translator of Apathy Is Out.
O Riordain’s poems have been translated by many poets, but until now no single writer has translated the majority of the poems. This collection gives a much more unified sense of O Riordain’s work, catching the poetry’s verve, playfulness and range and also ‘the music you still hear in Munster,/even in places where it has gone under’.
