Caitríona O'Reilly's poetry is remarkable for its precise observation of
the natural world. Her second collection, The Sea Cabinet, broadens that
clear-sighted vision in poems also haunted by history, consolidating the
achievement of her prizewinning début volume, The Nowhere Birds. Her
title-poem conjures the vanished world of the whaling industry, and
serves as a starting-point for other acute meditations on natural and
cultural obsolescence. Yet the habitual concerns of the lyric self are
present too, in poems which enact the dilemmas and anxieties of the
individual amidst a rapidly changing environment. The Sea Cabinet was a
Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the Irish
Times Poetry Now Award. Caitríona O'Reilly's first collection The
Nowhere Birds won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, given for the
best book by any new Irish writer published in 2001. Her third
collection Geis won the Irish Times Poetry Now Award 2016.