# Micheal O'Siadhail

Micheal O'Siadhail (Irish: Mícheál Ó Siadhail; born 12 January, 1947) is an Irish poet. He is a recipient of the Marten Toonder Prize and the Irish American Culture Institute Prize for Literature.

## Early life

Micheal O'Siadhail was born into a middle-class Dublin family. His father, a chartered accountant, was born in County Monaghan, and his mother was a Dubliner with roots in County Tipperary.
At age of twelve, O'Siadhail attended the Jesuit boarding school, Clongowes Wood College, an experience he later described in some of his poetry. At thirteen, he visited the Aran Islands, an experience which had a large impact on him.

## Career

Micheal O'Siadhail studied at Trinity College Dublin (1964–68) where his teachers included David H. Greene and Máirtín Ó Cadhain. He was elected a Scholar of the College and took a First Class Honours Degree. His circle in Trinity included David McConnell, Mary Robinson and David F. Ford. O'Siadhail then took a government exchange scholarship and studied folklore and Icelandic at the University of Oslo. He continues to see Scandinavian literature as a major influence.
In 1970 he married Bríd Ní Chearbhaill, who was born in Gweedore in County Donegal. She was a teacher for most of her life.
For seventeen years, O'Siadhail worked as an academic; firstly, as a lecturer at Trinity College (1969–73), where he was awarded an MLitt in 1971, and then as a research professor at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. During these years he gave named lectures in Dublin and at Harvard University and Yale University and was a visiting professor at the University of Iceland in 1982. In 1987 he resigned his professorship to write poetry.
He was a member of the Arts Council of the Republic of Ireland (1987–93), of the Advisory Committee on Cultural Relations (1989–97), and was editor of Poetry Ireland Review. He was the founding chairman of ILE (Ireland Literature Exchange). As a founder member of Aosdána (Academy of Distinguished Irish Artists) he is part of a circle of artists and has worked with his friend, the composer Seóirse Bodley, and the painters Cecil King and Mick O'Dea. In 2008 he gave a reading as part of Brian Friel's eightieth birthday celebration.
He represented Ireland at the Poetry Society's European Poetry Festival in London in 1981 and at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1997. He was writer-in-residence at the Yeats Summer School in 1991 and writer-in-residence at the University of British Columbia in 2002.
In 2018, O'Siadhail was included in The Tablet magazine's ′Fifty Minds That Matter′ – fifty men and women who are ″adding some Catholic salt to the contemporary cultural soup″.
During his years as an academic, O'Siadhail, writing under the Irish spelling of his name, published works on the linguistics of Irish and a textbook for learners of Irish.

## Development

In 1978, O'Siadhail published his first poetry collection, The Leap Year (originally written in Irish), which was a meditation on healing and nature set against an urban background. This was followed in 1980 by Rungs of Time (originally in Irish) which, in an Edda-adjacent style, announced many of the characteristic themes that would dominate his work and in 1982 Belonging (the last of this trio originally written in Irish) emphasised, by its title, relationships as a major theme. There were two more collections which contained a few of his best-known poems, Springnight in 1983 and The Image Wheel in 1985, before he went full-time and began a series of books based on broad themes.
The Chosen Garden was published in 1990, which he himself described as "an effort to face my own journey, to comprehend and trace one's own tiny epic." In 1992 he published Hail! Madam Jazz: New and Selected Poems which includes the new sequence The Middle Voice. In 1995 came A Fragile City, which is a meditation in four parts on the theme of trust. Our Double Time, published three years later in 1998, explores the liberation of facing human finitude in a way that allows a greater intensity of living. Then, in 2002, The Gossamer Wall was published. It evokes the Holocaust from its origins to its aftermath in a book-length sequence of stark intensity and was shortlisted for the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize. In Love Life, published in 2005, O'Siadhail reflects on and rejoices in a long marriage. This was followed in 2007 by Globe.