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Caitríona O'Reilly

Caitríona O'Reilly was born in Dublin in 1973, grew up in Wicklow, and studied English and Archeology at Trinity College, Dublin. She wrote her Ph.D. on American poetry, specifically Emily Dickinson, H.D., and Sylvia Plath. She has taught at Trinity College, Dublin, St. Patrick's College, Dublin, and the Dun Laoghaire Institute of Arts and Design.

O'Reilly is on the editorial board of the journal Metre, for which she has written reviews and essays. She has also reviewed for The Irish Times, Poetry Review, and Times Literary Supplement, among others.

Her first collection, The Nowhere Birds (Bloodaxe Press, 2001) won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and her poetry has been included in many anthologies.

She lives in Wicklow.

On a Dropped Feather

    Until the feather tapers like an arrow
it's a stem of hollow smoky glass
unsnappable from root to subtle tip.
A grounded starling could survive the loss.
    This ferny plumage where the shaft begins
is made of down too delicate for flight,
unlike the finny structure of the outer wing,
fashioned for soaring. Perhaps the taut
    intrinsic music of a bird comes
from the staves on its small fledged limbs.
The feather's utmost fibres have all the colour
and congruence of shot silk. From the loud strife
  and beating of wings in the sky somewhere
  it fell like the notched blade of a knife.

Back to The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry: Volume 1

Wake Forest University • Winston-Salem, North Carolina