When the local feels universal for poet Bernard O'Donoghue

Cork poet Bernard O’Donoghue is on the shortlist for next week’s TS Eliot prize. He tells Colette Sheridan why, though he moved to the UK many years ago, his home area still has such a presence in his poetry.

ALTHOUGH Co Cork-born poet and retired academic Bernard O’Donoghue has lived most of his life in England, his elegiac poetry is rooted in his native Cullen in North Cork. Short-listed for the second time for the TS Eliot Award, to be announced on January 16, the quietly spoken O’Donoghue (who doesn’t think he’ll win the award) says, quite simply: “My heart is here.”

Over coffee in a Cork city hotel, O’Donoghue says he has always felt like a bit of an exile in the UK. “Not an unwelcome exile, but that has all been shaken up by Brexit. It has changed how people feel about the world and how outsiders feel about England.”