Bernard O’Donoghue, reviewing Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams: Selected Prose Writings (Gallery Press), in The Irish Times [Weekend] (12 Jan. 2002), notes that O’Driscoll kept the day-job; ‘the impact on poetry of the need to write accurate, unelaborated report language is beneficial, both directly and by focusing on the question of appropriate style’; speaks of O’Driscoll’s earning his right to pass strictures on ‘partial reviews’ by friends though his own ‘critical incorruptibility’; remarks that many of O’Driscoll’s seniors first learned to read Milocz [sic] and Holub through his reviews in Crane Bag and Hibernia when in his twenties; the present collection ded. to Nuala Farrell, lit. ed. of Hibernia in halcyon days; essays on Mahon, Berryman and Yeats, Simon Armitage, Michael Hoffman et al. O’Donoghue celebrated the first essay, on growing up in Thurles, as laying down ‘a blue-print for the understanding of any life’ and the last chapter, entitled ‘Losers, Weepers’, and departing from Christian Boltanski’s installation “Lost Property”, which O’Donoghue places in company with Barthes and Hubert Butler; in final judgement he calls it ‘a book for the year 2001’. ( p.8.)

Kevin Kiely, review of Exemplary Damages (Anvil), in Books Ireland (March 2003), writes facetiously: ‘God is dead, life is dead and O’Driscoll sounds as if he is not feeling very well himself either - “Our one true God has died [and we] are rewarded with chainstore loyalty points”’, and notes a homage to William Carlos Williams in the lines: ‘Come back. Granma Moses, lead us / from the desert of downtown / to the promised land of the red barn’ and detects a biblical voice without any irony its the treatment of sex and shopping, which he compares adversely with Naomi Klein’s No Logo.

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George Szirtes, review of New and Selected Poems, in The Guardian (7 May 2005): ‘To live in a world where “Drygulleted drains gulp down neat ram” where ageing love poets curl fingers “around the long flowing tresses of sentences”while hearing “the excited shriek of her zip”, where “not a speck of moth’s / dust is mislaid” and yet where death is continually moving into “newly-constructed suburbs” and a rainbow unfolds “its colour chart” precisely at the same time as “someone is dressing up for death” - to live in such a world is to inhabit a place built on infinite care and irony. / Though these quotations are mostly from different poems, the location remains the same. It is O’Driscoll land. It is a place that at first sight appears to be bordering on Larkin country, though it is not entirely contiguous with it, for while the Irish poet is avowedly an admirer of Philip Larkin, he is a more tender, more playfill and distinctly less xenophobic writer. [/.../] Driscoll is European modernist in other ways too: in his use of the prose poem for example, of the formal experiment as in “Towards a Cesare Pavese Title”, in the littering of gnomisms and downbeat epigrams, in the accumulations of the paraphernalia of modern life (“Elevator pings. Linen Trolleys”; “The steely assurance / of the self-cleaning hob”, the bedroom “where the en suite tiles / leave much to be desired”); in the deployment of management and ledger talk. / But above all, there is the sheer humaneness of a poetry that does extraordinary things while shrugging its shoulders and proceeding, as though such things were normal. Nowhere in this review have I referred to the specifics of contemporary Irish poetry, for while traces of Kavanagh and Mahon are detectable, it is as a poet of European temperament, and stature, that O’Driscoll demand to be judged. His terrain is, in effect, without borders: mordant, open, sharp, generous and sad like the father he describes in “Family Album”: ‘He smiles at some remark a mine. / Tonight, he will repeat it to my mother / as she fills the ringing tea pot / with hot water; and, dinner eaten, will / record it proudly in his diary like a sale.’ A more sentimental poet would have put a comma after “diary”. A properly tragic, one leaves it out.’ (See full text in RICORSO Library, “Reviews”, infra.)

Bernard O’Donoghue: ‘the Guardian of Poetry’, review of Dennis O’Driscoll, New and Selected Poems, in The Irish Times (8 Jan. 2005), p.13. ‘[...] But from the first his poems managed to express this elegiac view of things in a life-enhancing spirit. They are not depressing because they are so faithful to the events they describe, and O’Driscoll is mostly praised for his keenly observant fidelity to the everyday. However this is not a matter of photographic reproduction of normality. He has developed a poetic language which combines subtlety with clarity, and through it he exposes the extraordinary within the ordinary. This language draws with brilliant wit on his work as a civil servant since he was 16 (he is now 50, improbably enough). Never has the day job served the poetic cause better: the titles of his volumes draw on the official vocabulary of the various departments he has worked in. Death duties and customs and excise are a wonderful resource. To recite those volume-titles is a poem in itself: Hidden Extras, Weather Permitting, Long Story Short, The Bottom Line, Quality Time, Exemplary Damages, and Foreseeable Futures (the last the title for the new poems here which are added to selections from the previous volumes). O’Driscoll shares with Beckett the capacity to present the deathly through humour. These poems are life-enhancing not only because they are true but also because they are funny. This quality is most evident in the sequence which is reproduced in full here, The Bottom Line (1994): 50 11-line poems, all woven out of the language of business and bureaucracy. And, even if it is not his most substantial subject, the sequence is his most original and sharpest achievement: to write, like Pope, about dullness without being dull. Writers of the first significance always contribute something to literary language which it did not possess before, and no-one but O’Driscoll could have written this: “It is the wider picture I rake over in my mind: / how gearing can improve; whether to draw / the blind on loss-making subsidiaries / and let the liquidator worry about debts.” / But, if the dazzling wit of The Bottom Line was what enhanced O’Driscoll’s popularity, the poems of the following volume, Quality Time (1997), strengthen an aspiration towards more challenging depths.’ (See full text in RICORSO Library, “Reviews”, infra.)

Colin Graham, ‘Antidote to an allergy to poetry’, review of Exemplary Values (Anvil), in The Irish Times (8 Jan. 2003), Weekend [with another by Justin Quinn]: ‘[...] Dennis O’Driscoll’s Exemplary Damages picks up where his last collection, Weather Permitting , left off. O’Driscoll’s poetry, is stylistically restless, adopting a sometimes unsatisfying variety of voices and forms, as the occasion demands. His extended metaphors often have an understated humour about them. The grimmest of clichés have the last juices of meaning wrung out of them. [...] It’s a disconcerting switch then to a poem such as “Missing God”, which has a rare honesty about the need for religious belief in a secular society. However, the everyday details which pepper the poem never quite capture the alternative access to the God, which the poem is looking for. / O’Driscoll can be observant, jokey or serious, and is sometimes all three in one poem. At times he quietly watches the world, at others he is grumpily or comically irritable. Exemplary Damages has moments of joy, and poems which are both pleasurable and witty. But, as a whole, the collection disorientates because of its shifts of tone, and the tendency of some poems to adopt forms which are frustratingly unsuited to their theme. By the end of Exemplary Damages, the reader can not quite trust the poet’s voice to “put an accurate price-tag on life”, as O’Driscoll himself once described it.’ [End] (See full text in RICORSO Library, “Reviews”, infra.)

Honor O’Connor, ‘“While Stocks Last’: The Poetry of Dennis O’Driscoll & Contemporary Ireland’, in Global Ireland: Irish Literatures for the New Millenium, ed. Ondrej Pilny & Clare Wallace [IASIL Conference 2004] (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia 2005), pp.98-106: ‘[...] A central theme running through O’Driscoll’s poetry, especially that written in the 1990s, is how the transition of Ireland from near-bankruptcy in the early 1980s to Celtic Tiger growth-rates of 8-10 percent in the mid-1990s impinges on people’s lives. Workers have had to adjust to national and international competitiveness and new managerial practices; and “productivity,” the new buzzword, has caused stress at both managerial and shopfloor levels. Irish people generally feel that social values and the conditions of their lives have changed, with congested roads and the inflated cost of housing just two instances of what many have to contend with every day. In his scrutiny of contemporary life in Ireland O’Driscoll, as a full-time civil servant, writes from within the world of work. He is [98] by turn compassionate or satirical, rather than polemical. He certainly mocks the pretensions of the new managerial elite and the conspicuous consumerism that follows new money; but he is sympathetic towards individuals. [...] Over the past twenty-five years O’Driscoll has been keeping Ireland attuned to the outside world through his reviews and critical essays, all of which reveal his wide knowledge of poetry written in English, as well as poetry in translation, particularly from the languages of Eastern Europe. [Cites critical collection Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams (2002).]’ (pp.98-100.)

Fran Brearton, ‘Dennis O’Driscoll has never been, as he himself says, “party to income tax work”; but his long career in the office of Ireland’s Revenue Commissioners , moving from death duties to stamp duty, puts him, like Stevens or Larkin, in the tradition of “office poets” whose writing lives may be practically circumscribed by their civil (or other) service – the “toad work” as Larkin had it – but whose vocabularies and perspectives on “life” are unusually and productively enriched thereby. [...] In the title sequence of poems, O’Driscoll evaluates “the total / cost of living”, forcing us to rethink an everyday phrase. “Demand for human life,” he tells us, “is soaring. / Projections for the coming decades / forecast unprecedented growth.”’ (Cont.)

Further: ‘[...] the poems also brilliantly rework cliché and platitude. He risks overplaying his hand, but at his best, O’Driscoll gives the apparently throwaway remark a new lease of life. [...] He is sometimes described as the “Irish Larkin”, but the phrase does O’Driscoll both more and less than justice. If his inner aesthete and technique are less developed than Larkin’s, the critical generosity that characterises his writing life is something his predecessor lacked. He eschews the Larkinesque seduction technique (that seamless move from “I think” to “we all think”); often, a third-person voice works to curiously distancing effect, and where one senses an extraordinary intelligence at work, “personality” is kept at bay. The self-effacement is also characteristic of a poet who, unusually, says he is “more interested in other people’s poems than my own”. / O’Driscoll, as an office poet, has been pulled between two different lives, yet it is not their separation that is his strength, but their dialogue. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the Christ-figure he is drawn to in the poems, as in “Best Practice”, is the one who balances “two books”, who “wanted things / both ways at once”, and who is “never more / lovably human / than in that / dithering spirit”.’ [End; available online.]

Enda Wyley on Dennis O’Driscoll ‘a wedding and a funeral’, in The Irish Times (22 Dec. 2022)

One August afternoon in 2001 I met the poet Dennis O’Driscoll on George’s Street in Dublin. It’s not surprising at all that I met him there, as he worked close by in Revenue and Customs service and did so for nearly 40 years. I can see him now before me, his raincoat flapping, his thin frame resolute on the pavement, cloth bag filled with papers and books in his hand. I couldn’t hide my excitement. I’m getting married, I blurted out. Won’t you come to our wedding? I’m so sorry, but I can ‘t, he replied. But why? I wasn’t going to give up. I knew Dennis from poetry readings and events in Dublin in the 1990s, used to meet him on the Dart as I made my way into the inner-city school I worked in as a young teacher, was always up for poetry conversations with him as we were jostled by early morning commuters. What was I reading? What had he been reading? It didn’t take long for me to discover on those early morning train journeys the truth in poet David Wheatley’s remark that asking Dennis had he read any poetry was like asking Matt Talbot had he said his prayers. And then there were Dennis’s postcards with their distinctive writing ­- dark ink curls, that poets in Ireland were always chuffed to receive. As though a new poetry collection of yours wasn’t fully validated without the O’Driscoll stamp of approval. The flap of a card falling onto a hall floor. Words of praise to goad you on to new poems, better ways of writing. Dennis, after all, was well skilled in writing postcards. Hadn’t he written to Enid Blyton when he was a child? And she had replied and praised his handwriting! But he also wrote to Auden and Beckett, Stevie Smith, Brian Patten and received responses from them, as well. No wonder then, that he wrote to us Irish poets too. But I digress, I am still standing on George’s Street, not giving up. Do come to our wedding, I insisted again. I can ‘t. I only do deaths and funerals, Dennis said. And there it was, on a rainy afternoon in Dublin, the ironic wit and deadpan humour so evident in his poetry being spoken by the man himself. A humour that to this day, I still love to encounter in his work and that continues to energise me as a reader and poet. He did come to our wedding with his wife, the poet Julie O’Callaghan, and it was a huge privilege to have them both there. But thinking back now on his initial response to my invitation, I am reminded of his poem, No, Thanks, which energetically pokes fun at humans and their often painful urge to be social. But it’s a poem which also pokes fun at Dennis himself - who was an utterly charming man but a determinedly private one too. ‘No, I don’t want to drop over for a meal on my way home from work.... No, I haven’t the slightest curiosity about seeing how your attic conversion finally turned out...' It’s a poem which, when he was alive, drew much laughter from audiences, for Dennis was a memorably dry and witty performer of his work. I purposefully use the word performer, as sitting in the audience hearing Dennis read his work was an experience, not easily forgotten. He was an exemplary poet with a unique voice. A voice once heard you never forgot, both in person and on the page. ‘What is Mass like?’ our daughter once asked when she was little. Then quickly added, ‘Is it as boring as a poetry reading?’ Dennis would have got a great kick out of Freya’s comical wondering - she is actually not baptised - especially as her comment very much taps into his own mischievous teasing of the world and its rituals. There was a devilment there, a healthy cynicism of life and work. He wrote of subjects that as Heaney said, quoting Robert Frost, ‘were common in experience but uncommon in books’ - the dull commute to work, office parties, departure lounges. And, at the end of the day, ordinary questions like, what’s for dinner? Who will turn on the immersion? When all is said and done what counts is having someone you can phone at five to ask for the immersion heater to be switched to ‘bath’ and the pizza taken from the deepfreeze.             Home, from Quality Time, 1997. This year marks a decade since Dennis O’Driscoll’s death but as long as we continue to read his poetry, he will live on, inspiring us in the multitude of witty, wry poems of his that buzz with a humour all of their own.

—The Irish Times (22 Dec. 2022 - available online; accessed 27.12.2022.

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Quotations

“The Bottom Line”: ‘How did I get this far, become / this-worldy wise, letting off steam / to suppliers, sure of my own ground? / What did my dribbling, toddling stage / prepare me for? What was picked up / from cloth-paged books, stuffed bears, / all those cute gap-toothed years? / So embarrassing the idiocies of the past, / seen from the vantage of tooled-leather / and buffed teak, hands-on management / techniques, line logistics, voice mail.’ (Quoted by Barbara Brown, W. Virg. U.; IASIL 1999.)