In The History of Rain, Conor O’Callaghan’s first collection the poems occupy different thresholds: between stillness and motion, shade and light, shape and shapelessness.
Ordinary symbols such as room, house, garden, and road, are rendered less reliable by shifts of time and tenses. But The History of Rain is united ultimately by an awareness of elemental forces, of how those forces can influence experience, and by the poet’s constant need to arrest moments when history and the individual glance against each other.
Remarkably uniform in style and tone and carries an air of assurance rare in first collections . . . an accomplished and interesting book.
— Peter Sirr, ILS
A first volume of real promise and accomplishment . . . He writes verse that is simultaneously innocent in what it says yet sophisticated in the way it says it . . . [his] métier is the fragment, the glimpse, the moment caught quickly in the hand, looked at, relinquished, celebrated . . . This is a new name I warrant we’ll hear more of.
— Robert Nye, The Times
O’Callaghan’s relaxed lyricism engages promisingly with everyday moments of stillness and motion, and with the elements in which he swims, literally and metaphorically, with considerable grace.
— William Scammell, Independent on Sunday
