O'Driscoll's distaste for "wonder" in response to the bare facts of life was, perhaps, fortified by his working life as a lawyer and civil servant: the fine detail and jargon of legal instruments and management provided him with a vocabulary which was at least one remove from Ireland's lyric tradition. fail again better", while in Spare Us, he writes: "Spare us the spring" and "And spare us, no less, the need / for wonder".
Indeed, there is a caustic revision of one of Beckett's most-quoted lines in Or Bust: "Quote that witty quip you heard at Rotary. O'Driscoll defuses Romantic idealism about life on Earth, offering instead a jaundiced, omniscient, sometimes bitterly Beckettian reflection on being "born astride a grave". Preoccupied with mortality, the poems appear bewildered by good health and pleasure. Striking individual successes include the darkly gothic relish of poems like Someone ("Someone is dressing up for death today, a change of skirt or tie / eating a final slice of buttered sliced pan, tea") and the account of his own conception, Job (addressing his parents, he asks, "Could they not have turned over / or taken more care?). His shocking double bereavement skews O'Driscoll's perspective as a poet: wherever he would look, in his three decades' work, death is in the offing. In the book's first poems O'Driscoll writes about his parents' early deaths, which orphaned the poet and his siblings: "looking forward becomes looking back / until there is nothing either way but death", he writes in Siblings, a poem which also established O'Driscoll's characteristically unsettling and matter-of-fact tone: "We have spent a year without him – his thoughts / scattered, his burden of organs eased." Such a sense of alienation and rupture, of wrong beginnings, is evident on almost every page of Dennis O'Driscoll's Collected Poems (Carcanet, £19.99). For Rilke this marks a rupture, an example of how human consciousness, try as it might, is never at home in this world we live and die in. In Rainer Maria Rilke's great essay On Dolls, the poet remembers the alienating discovery that the doll, no matter how much attention is lavished on it, must remain its own inert thing, separate from whatever we project onto it.
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