A Short Critique of Desmond O’Grady’s Poetry

 

A Short Critique of Desmond O’Grady’s Poetry

1. Multicultural and Historical Scope

O’Grady’s poetry is renowned for its international breadth and classical reach. He draws from the ancient Mediterranean, Islamic Spain, and post-colonial North Africa, infusing Irish poetry with a global consciousness. In Hellas, for instance, he writes:

"Time’s layers: Troy’s charred stones, / Rome’s columns out of joint, / Alexandria’s lost shelves – / Still smoke under the present."

This passage demonstrates O’Grady’s command of historical layering, drawing on mythic and real ruins to meditate on cultural continuity and decay. His imagery spans millennia but remains grounded and immediate.

2. Linguistic Control and Classical Influence

O’Grady’s work is formally disciplined and often austere, shaped by his engagement with classical and Semitic languages. He achieves compression without sacrificing clarity:

"We are not heirs. / The past is not ours to inherit. / We seize it—or it slips."
—from The Road Taken

This aphoristic turn reflects the influence of both Greek gnomic poetry and Arabic wisdom literature. O’Grady pares language down to its essential truth, echoing the formal precision of ancient lyric while speaking to modern anxieties about heritage and loss.

3. Philosophical and Moral Inquiry

Many of his poems meditate on impermanence and the fragility of human civilization. In The Alexandrians, he writes:

"Their lamps went out; the papyri rotted. / A sea-change of silence settled / Where once syllables flamed."

Here, the beauty of knowledge, language, and scholarship is eulogised in an elegy to Alexandria. The metaphor of “syllables flaming” captures the poet’s reverence for language—and its transience.

Similarly, in a later poem, he reflects:

"Words are what survive / When cities fall. / But who remembers / The tongue of Troy?"

These lines encapsulate the paradox at the heart of much of O’Grady’s work: that poetry both preserves and loses and that language is both legacy and ruin.

4. Emotional Reserve

One potential shortcoming of O’Grady’s poetry is its emotional coolness. His meditative tone, while intellectually rich, often avoids confessional warmth or personal revelation. Even in poems that touch on loss, such as Eurydice, the feeling is filtered through myth and restraint:

"He turned. / Not from love’s weakness / But the strength of doubt. / And she returned to shadow."

This is elegant and intellectually potent, but emotionally distant. The emphasis is on the psychological allegory of doubt, not the visceral pain of losing a loved one. It is a cerebral take on an archetypal human tragedy.

5. Archaizing Tendencies

O’Grady’s diction sometimes carries a formal or archaic tone, reflective of his classical leanings. In poems such as To the Muse, he writes:

"Come, goddess, not with lyre, / But fierce with fire."

The invocation of a "goddess" and the apostrophic "Come" harken back to Homeric or Pindaric styles. While this lends gravitas, it may alienate readers used to more contemporary or colloquial voices.

Conclusion

Desmond O’Grady’s poetry is intellectually rich, stylistically controlled, and globally resonant. Through his verse, the classical world converses with the modern, and ruins whisper into the present. While his work can at times be emotionally reserved and stylistically remote, it stands as a testament to poetry’s power to stretch across cultures and centuries.

His voice—though quieter in the canon—is one of the more original and erudite of modern Irish poetry. As he once wrote:

"I plant my words / In borrowed soil, / And watch them rise / Like native grain."

That line may well serve as his poetic credo: a translator of civilizations, a citizen of many worlds, and a poet who gave Irish letters a broader compass.

Kieran Beville is a poet/author who studied English and History as well as Greek and Roman Civilization and Philosophy at University College Cork.