An Evening of Poetry with Deirdre O'Connor

Dierdre O'Connor is a wonderful gem of a poet. She been awarded the Cleveland State Poetry Center Prize. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Crazyhorse, Cave Wall, and other journals, and she has been awarded residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Heinrich Boll Cottage in Ireland. She directs the Writing Center at Bucknell University, where she also serves as Associate Director of the Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets. A native of Pittsburgh, she lives in Central Pennsylvania.

About the book: We are going to use this quote by Leslie Harrison, author of Reck as it perfectly describes O'Connor's book.

“Odes, nocturnes, aubades-if Keats were still here, he'd want to have a conversation and a glass of claret with Deirdre O'Connor. These are gorgeous poems but not pretty poems. There's a fidelity to the often-messy world, a fidelity to the messy truth that gives this book a rare, clear strength gracefully, even delicately applied. From the first lines "What wind is this, / turning the pear tree's blossoms/ to loose-leaf snow?/ What wind, pushing/ the semen scent through town," we see that this will be an unusual collection, one that weds the best impulses of the Romantics with the earthy, complicated, mucky "semen scented" world. What holds the book together even as it raises the stakes of the poems is the gorgeous music of the language.”