O Love, As Long as Love You Can

‘How love is all when all is said and done’ is at the heart of this distillation of a lifetime’s experience into a personal ‘patchwork of wisdom’ shared across the generations with a grandson. The love relates to the whole of life, and the poet ranges through marriage and friendship, literature, music and art, justice and power, vocation and career, the dynamics of grandfather-grandson and father-son relationships, grief and death, and ‘celebration’s sweet excess’.

O’Siadhail has dealt with these before at length in his major works, such as Love Life, The Five Quintets, and Desire, but here they all come together, concentrated into a moving, intimate address to 22-year old Eoghan, a grandson sensitively imagined as someone representing the rising generation. Eoghan’s life--past, present, and especially future--is the springboard for a week, morning and afternoon, of deep sharing. Each day has its own themes, resonating with the day’s name in a range of languages. Love is the golden thread through the week, with trust, infinitely precious and always vulnerable, woven in throughout as the core essential if love is to be mutual. The days of sharing are preceded both by O’Siadhail’s personal prose Foreword and by a poetic Prologue, and followed by an Epilogue, and the form throughout is superbly crafted in Dantean terza rima, rhyming and rhythmic. This is a rare gem of profound, accessible, many-hued wisdom.