The crucial events in modern Irish history--the Great Famine, the `48 Rebellion, movements for Tenants' Rights and Home Rule, the Easter Rising and the War of Independence--are here related, not with the detached precision of the historian, but as they were experienced by the rural poor. In My Story, first published in 1915, well-known writer and priest Peter O'Leary recorded his observations of late 19th-century Ireland: families sustained by tiny plots of land, confrontations with landlords, and famines that drove people to workhouses. Translator Cyril Ó Ceirín has rendered O'Leary's Irish in the colorful, colloquial English of a well-educated Munster clergyman.

My Story

History

O’Leary, Peter

Ceirin, Cyril O.

Americas

Oxford University Press

How do poets use language to render the transcendent, often dizzyingly inexpressible nature of the divine? In an age of secularism, does spirituality have a place in modern American poetry? In Thick and Dazzling Darkness, Peter O’Leary reads a diverse set of writers to argue for the existence and importance of religious poetry in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature. He traces a poetic genealogy that begins with Whitman and Dickinson and continues in the work of contemporary writers to illuminate an often obscured but still central spiritual impulse that has shaped the production and imagination of American poetry. O’Leary presents close and comprehensive readings of the modernist, late-modernist, and postmodern poets Robinson Jeffers, Frank Samperi, and Robert Duncan, as well as the contemporary poets Joseph Donahue, Geoffrey Hill, Fanny Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, Pam Rehm, and Lissa Wolsak. Examining how these poets drew on a variety of traditions, including Catholicism, Gnosticism, the Kabbalah, and mysticism, the book considers how modern and contemporary poets have articulated the spiritual in their work. O’Leary also argues that an anxiety of misunderstanding exists in the study and writing of poetry between secular and religious impulses and that the religious nature of poets’ works is too often marginalized or misunderstood. Examining the works of a specific poet in each chapter, O’Leary reveals their complexity and offers a defense of the value and meaning of religious poetry against the grain of a secular society.

Thick and Dazzling Darkness: Religious Poetry in a Secular Age

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Columbia University Press

Brings together the study of literature with the psychology and history of religions.

Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan & the Poetry of Illness

Wesleyan University Press

Robert Duncan's poetic creativity does not exist without a language of illness, nor the revelation and insight that such language generates. This ground-breaking interdisciplinary work is one of the first book-length studies of Robert Duncan's poetry, and it includes a treatment of his influences (H.D. and Freud) and those he influenced (Nathaniel Mackey and John Taggart). Through close readings of crucial poems, Peter O'Leary shows how Duncan's poetry locates a gnostic insight expressed through a language of illness in the realms of religion. Gnosticism is a doctrine of salvation by knowledge. In addition to studying Duncan's poetry and his life, O'Leary considers the psychological impact Freud's ideas of the unconscious and dream interpretation had on the poet. O'Leary continues with an analysis of Duncan's work in light of the theories of shamanism put forth by religion historian Mircea Eliade. Along the way, O'Leary undertakes detailed discussions of gnosticism, hermeticism, spiritualism, psychoanalysis, shamanism and religions of the African diaspora.

Depth Theology taps the religious potential of poetry to access both the interior and the exterior worlds. Inspired by depth psychology, the field of psychology devoted to the unconscious, Peter O'Leary's poems work to discover the religious knowledge of the unconscious mind. While seeking a revelatory poetry, O'Leary engages the inconclusive quality of the revealed, observing that "There's / a liquidy trickiness to life, an entropy / of spillage." The religious imagination that evolves in this series of thirty-four poems is unclouded by dogma and richly colored by erudition, while it tests the limits of human language and experience in an effort to understand our inwardness. Overflowing with images of birds and other objects of day-to-day experience, interwoven with the mythic, allegorical, and biblical, Depth Theology charts a path to understanding our innermost worlds. From "Lux Contemplatio": "there is no place anymore for us to migrate. The need / yet remains. / Antarctica means now an interior domain. Curiosity / about our inner life increases. A nomad's desert God is an inward / generator. Our outward movement yields our soul's circumincession / its insitting / in rotation with the divine abeyance"

Depth Theology: Poems (The Contemporary Poetry Ser.)

Poetry

University of Georgia Press

Séadna

Teen & Young Adult

Glendale Press

Poetry. Luminous epinoia, a Gnostic notion, stands for the primordial imagination from which the whole of creation came into being. Likewise, Peter O'Leary's poetry moves from a mythic unconscious to its manifestation in mutual dreaming: family, friends, literary forbearers, and political demons take their place in a Dantescan vision of order and strife. Yet the prevailing mode of this book is less narrative than devotional: O'Leary's rich diction, full of archaisms and neologisms, tessellates dreadcomb, lutrescence, fogroom, and beatitude, the whole of it forming a complex, cathedralic figure for desire.

Luminous Epinoia

The Cultural Society

Poetry. What does the mind do with its own "excessive novelty," the efflorescence of consciousness that saturates the world, at once waste and grace? in PHOSPHORESCENCE OF THOUGHT, Peter O'Leary contemplates the frothing song of a house Wren as an instance of this "fluid exuberance" of mind. And like the bird's song, his poetry unfurls a work of evolutionary wonder: exhilarating in its creative force, virtuosic in its repetitions and variations, and mournful in the face of environmental devastations.

Phosphorescence of Thought

Poetry. Drawing episodes from the Kalevala, a Finnish epic, Peter O'Leary has created a poem of atmospheric intensity, full of elemental forces harnessed by supernatural craft. Line by line, it is composed of images and epithets that flicker into animation, condensed phrases that cascade into sequences of unfolding action. Throughout the quest, THE SAMPO returns us to the hazards of making, the power of singing, and the adventure of poetry.

The Sampo

Poetry. In a time of ecological crisis, Peter O'Leary finds in mushrooms "an elaborate pattern," a circulation of energy, a strange Kingdom with the power to alter consciousness. From the opening line "Earth is best," each proposition takes root in the terroir of soils, in the woods and meadows of the Upper Midwest and Pacific Northwest. On each foray, we find hidden systems bearing fruit, "crowning from the duff of white pines / and birch trees," extending upward from "loam's rich undying gloom." Equally, these poems bloom from a rich mulch of linguistic inheritance, a compost of ancient texts and esoteric knowledge, searching out old words of exquisite exactitude and resonance. As readers, our attention quickens as we join the hunt, discovering elemental pleasures on every page, sometimes with the prickling onset of psychedelic consciousness. And like fungi, these poems work to break down false oppositions, returning us to a reciprocity between death and life, panic and joy, anxiety and euphoria, tocsin and cure.

Earth Is Best (Studies for the Advancement of the Sacro-magical, 1)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by O’Leary, Peter. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by O’Leary, Peter

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by O’Leary, Peter. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

My Story

Thick and Dazzling Darkness: Religious Poetry in a Secular Age

Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan & the Poetry of Illness

Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan & the Poetry of Illness

Depth Theology: Poems (The Contemporary Poetry Ser.)

Séadna

Luminous Epinoia

Phosphorescence of Thought

The Sampo

Earth Is Best (Studies for the Advancement of the Sacro-magical, 1)