Outliving

"Bernard O'Donoghue's magnificent fourth collection of poetry explores its title in a series of beautifully wrought poems whose simple elegance belie their complexity. There are moving elegies for people the poet has outlived. There are poems too about living outside the poet's original environment and the inclination to return there for stories and feelings: the MacNeicean 'tourist in his own country', perpetually restive and perpetually homesick. But most important there is 'outliving' as in 'outdoing', or living a life of higher quality: the drinking of 'red wine outside in the sunlit squares' that is accorded to the less privileged - to building site workers or young soldiers who are cannon-fodder in the world's trouble-spots."