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Article Excerpt
Exemplary Damages, by Dennis O'Driscoll; Anvil Press Poetry, 2002, about $24.
DENNIS O'DRISCOLL is one of the reasons we can continue to believe in contemporary poetry. His lucid, uncompromising, profound yet playful intelligence looks into the heart of darkness and returns to tell its tale. He is unflinchingly honest where a lesser poet would settle for the softer option, the easy resolution.
The poems in his latest collection visit familiar O' Driscoll territory--love, death, work. As I read him, he seems to be saying that there is an inevitability about life that is alleviated, if not quite redeemed, by literature (including, I believe, scripture) and art.
In O'Driscoll's world, to work is to pray even if it is prayer in the secular sense: work brings its own consolations, the satisfaction of a job well done is its own reward. Consider the "Technicians, overseers, assistant / depot managers, stock controllers. / Old fashioned nine-to-five men" in their "diamond-patterned sweaters" who, unknown to their calorie-counting wives, tuck into a fry on payday.
They might be Eliot's hollow men, but, in O'Driscoll's view, they are not. Their lives might have drifted some distance from the passion of primary meaningfulness, but O'Driscoll informs us that "there are worse fates" and that "they know [it] well enough". These people are content with their lot, they are not consumed by worldly ambition. Their reward is that "Life tastes great some days".
To the casual eye, this world might seem jaded; in a world where "Our one true God has died" living might seem pointless. This is a world that, in the name of human kindness, remains "eternally precious in the eyes of man", a world where
We love one another so much the slightest hurt cries out for compensation: sprain your ankle in a pothole and City Hall will pay exemplary damages...
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