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Moulding the Bread I have bought the bread. It is rich with arcane languages, I recognise them, a fermented mound of verbs and nouns. I take the quickened bread and hold it with closed eyes in my double bed while you are absent. I place it in a long plait just where you lie, where […]

Two Poems

The men I once knew The men I once knew offered gifts, like male penguins offering stones to a female in the competition for courtship. One offered a bag of lemons, bright and shiny, still warm from the Mediterranean garden where he plucked them. Another took me on a boat. It had no […]

Disappearances.

Who dug the graves, and what do they know? I often think about the men who dug the graves of the Disappeared. Who were they and what do they remember? Chances are, according to Seamus Ruddy’s sister Anne Morgan when she once spoke about it on television, they were probably the youngest in the units […]

Calm, objective space . . . but are we our geography? Questions from critic Sarah Hopkins on my new book of poems.

Stride Magazine is an online mag. Here’s another response to “Those April Fevers”. I was happy with the cool tone of the critique. The writer herself is objective and non-agenda-ed in my view, a valuable quality which writers appreciate. From Sarah Hopkins’ review in Stride Magazine (UK): “[Mary] O’Donnells sixth poetry collection shows her experience […]

A response to “Those April Fevers”, from Gillian Drake (Roundyhouse Magazine, June 2015)

As a quick preamble to this review from Welsh poet and critic Gillian Drake, I feel I must mention the fact that this is the third review I’ve seen of my seventh collection of poems “Those April Fevers”. There has certainly been none in Ireland, yet three in England.I’m not sure what this says, if […]

Women of the World Vignettes

WOMEN OF THE WORLD VIGNETTES 1. Valium Jen went to the altar seeing the world through an untroubled haze of valium, delivered an hour before she left for the Mass by the local doctor’s syringe. The doctor was a friend of her mother. It would have sedated an elephant, never mind tranquillising a bride, Jen […]

A Dog Has Died

I thought I should publish the piece below as a blog. It was broadcast on Sunday Miscellany (RTE Radio 1, Ireland) recently, and perhaps it interests dog people . . . so here goes. A DOG HAS DIED Since childhood, you’ve been aware of this fact of life. Dogs arrive, they keep you company for […]

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