Desire

Micheal O’Siadhail

Critically acclaimed and award-winning poet Micheal O’Siadhail’s Desire is a quartet of poems which addresses the pressing global concerns of our times

The poet describes the devastating effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, how it spread worldwide, paralyzing our society and instilling daily fear of death, particularly in older people. Hospitals were unable to cope, restaurants and businesses closed, workers were laid off, schools and universities taught remotely, and few weddings or funerals could take place throughout a pandemic which he sees as ultimately reflecting our relationship to the damaged environment and to climate change. The current ecological crisis is rooted in new reckless patterns of rapacity which threaten our habitat as our flawed stewardship has led to global warming, heat waves, raging fires, and hurricanes. Still, we fail to curb our greed. Our need for comfort, convenience, and instant communication on the internet, which began as an idealistic dream of making knowledge universal, has resulted in an overconsumption that further harms our planet, a consumerism driven by algorithms and internet surveillance.

MICHEAL O’SIADHAIL is an internationally acclaimed poet whose works include The Five Quintets, Collected Poems, One Crimson Thread, and Testament

Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Epigraph

Pest

Habitat

Behind the Screen

Desiring

Epilogue

“In this devastating, scathing, penetrating analysis of our world’s vulnerability to self-inflicted existential crises, Micheal O’Siadhail is revealed as the poet, prophet, pastor, preacher par excellence of our time and for our time. Desire is a revolutionary call to care. It is a juggernaut flattening our negligence, our greed, our passivity, our stupidity. Can we meet, in time, his magisterial challenge to redeem our ecocidal mania? His deep-set faith in humanity’s desire and need to dwell in love, in respect for God’s creation and one another opens the door that lets hope in.”

MARY McALEESE, President of Ireland 1997–2011

It is time to regain a more modest perspective on our part in the natural world and learn again to be better forebears for the generations to come, responsible stewards of the earth we share. A greater sense of our role as humble, trusted custodians can free us for wonder and praise and allow us to rediscover sources of meaning worthy of life-enhancing desires. O’Siadhail affirms with realism, imagination, and inspiring wisdom how our human desires and longings can open up ways through our unprecedented global challenges.

“O’Siadhail poses one of the most pressing questions of our day: ’Have we learnt what matters most of all?’ He sets it in the broad sweep of a poetic diagnosis of the climate crisis, global pandemic, misinformation, and surveillance capitalism and challenges us to consider what forms of desire would honor the goodness and givenness and limits of our common home.”

MIROSLAV VOLF, MATTHEW CROASMUN, and RYAN McANNALLY-LINZ, authors of Life Worth Living

“Micheal O’Siadhail’s new cycle of poems, reflection on our time poet’s wisdom, humor, compassion, and razor-wire sensibilities explore the fate of our new century as we ricochet between hope and hopelessness. The world is ready and waiting for this poetry. Yearning for it, really.”

SHOSHANA ZUBOFF Emeritus,

Harvard University

“A poet fit for an age of interlocking global crises.”

Kenneth L. Woodward, former Religion editor of Newsweek

“This is poetry as the highest art, breath into song.”

—Laurie Zoloth, University of Chicago

“A dazzling array of rhyme schemes and evocative language.”

Eugene O’Brien University of

Limerick

ISBN 978-1-4813-2043-6

$54.99 | Paperback

250 pages

6 x 9

December 1, 2023

12 color illustrations