Gangs of Shadow

by Michael O'Neill

When Michael O'Neill senses gangs / of shadow half-beckoning from twilit water, the moment is eerily alluring as well as scary. Fusions of feeling recur throughout a book that has something of the dash and darkness praised in his poem 'Louis MacNeice', along with a strong responsiveness to the physical and visual experience of living. Formally adventurous and alert to change and movement, combining memorable phrasing with a reaching towards the unsayable, Gangs of Shadow brims with imagery of past, present and future; its poems seek to bear witness, and above all sing.

Read a new poem and a 'deep note' on it by Michael O'Neill in Prac Crit

978-1906570-64-4 (pbk) £8.99
978-1906570-82-8 (hbk) £11.99
80pp
Published June 2014

Quotes and Reviews

O'Neill's poetry typically expects something more from his reader, multiple meanings are woven throughout his poems and clever phrasing deconstructs familiar images with memorable flourish. ...more »

Phillip Clement, Stride Magazine, 2014

Michael O'Neill points to the elusiveness of meaning / purpose via impeccably crafted, mainly formal poems, with simple diction that makes for nuanced arguments. ...more »

Belinda Cooke, The Warwick Review, Sept 2014

Michael O'Neill's work builds a bookshelf in your head. One way it does this is to refer to previous poems. ... Traditional, maybe, but these poems remind me not only of patrician poets like Hardy (in "Convergence", for example) but such ardently contemporary poets as Adrienne Rich whose magnificent poem "A Long Conversation" is well known to O'Neill. ...more »

Claire Crowther, Poetry London

The fine poem, 'Elsewhere' ...., while admiring religion's 'grail of total strangeness', also implicitly reproves such otherworldliness through its own satisfyingly muscular manipulation of syntax and sound: I'd welcome such a thing, in fact, no more than wintry repetition, even as I'd hope the sea might never lose its air of danger held in check, or as I'd pray that some I've known might never crush the wish that those they'd loved might pass across to heaven like beaten ships discovering a shore The title of the book comes from an early, unnerving moment when a speaker sees his own spirit as a shadow absorbed by other shadows pooling on a stream. ...more »

Conor Carville, London Magazine, April/May 2015

The atmosphere of these haunting poems is as crepuscular as the title promises. The tone is set by the opening poem, "The Garden", in which a park is used and loved until mysterious all-powerful authorities first close it and then announce that it has "had to be abolished" - a sinister fable which at once invites and resists interpretation. ...more »

Jan Montefiore, TLS, 3 June 2015

The greatest compliment one can pay a volume of poetry is that it excites. It doesn't altogether matter whether that excitement is the arousal brought by Dylan Thomas's energies or the mind-knotting orchestrations of Geoffrey Hill; nor does it matter if it is that engagement of the critical and analytical, tangled with pleasure and trepidation, which O'Neill accomplishes in us. ...more »

P. Q. R. Anderson, Keats-Shelley Review, 2 Sep 2016