Using distance to tell the truth — as he saw it

The title of his latest collection of poems, Farmers Cross, is a metaphorical anecdote for that turning point in his life, he says, where things could have been so different.

The country that O’Donoghue refers to in latest collection is dead and gone: a land of gated fields, country lanes, and subsistence agriculture. He wouldn’t be the first to write about such a place. The Ireland — or the vision of Ireland at least — that Yeats, Heaney, or Joyce construct, so often, is half way between a place that’s real and the wanderings of the imagination.