Ciaran Berry Selected Works

Reading Ovid on a transatlantic flight while registering concerns for his new-born son (‘How can we keep him from the harm this world can be . . .’), conjuring a mirage in the West of Ireland a century ago, and evoking teenage longing and lusts in recreations of ‘the morning after the night before’, Ciaran Berry’s powerfully resonant second collection focuses also on Nero’s circus in full swing and the thoughts of St Augustine, the pathologist who kept Einstein’s brain, Darwin’s expeditions and discoveries, a Japanese ghost ship adrift after a tsunami, and the ‘Beltway’ sniper attacks of 2002.

The Sphere of Birds, Ciaran Berry’s debut collection of poems, effortlessly moves back and forth between here and there, then and now, the personal and the historic, the modern and the mythic. Berry imagines the transatlantic journeys of John James Audubon and reveals his own heartfelt experience moving from his first house. The poems take as their subject such varied experiences as an eye exam in Manhattan and chasing rabbits around a beach in Donegal. These poems have a strong sense of place, whether it’s the imagined space of Coney Island in 1903 or the playground of Berry’s childhood convent school. The Sphere of Birds delights in forging unlikely links, earthed in the stuff of paintings and in the lives of poets, artists, and the occasional saint.

Drawing on the poet’s life in Ireland and the United States, the poems explore the joy and grief found in those places. Moving from rural Ireland to the heart of New York City, from local detail to historical specifics, and from the experienced occasion to the imagined or interpreted event, Berry’s poems effectively master shifts in both time and space. Berry delves into the lives of artists, obscure historical figures, and other poets for inspiration. He embraces elements of both Irish and American poetry, paying tribute as much to the spirit of Larry Levis as to that of W. B. Yeats. Accessible, immediate, and visceral, The Sphere of Birds offers a musicality that is increasingly rare in contemporary poetry.