Tell Me This Is Normal: New & Selected Poems

Tell Me This Is Normal is a generous selection of Julie O’Callaghan’s poetry, ranging from the Edible Anecdotes her readers gorged on in the 1980s to her later work confronting a very ’scary’ 21st century with an armoury of lively and defiant language - as well as a baseball bat under the bed. She is a singularly acute observer of human behaviour, with a sharp Swiftian eye and an alert ear that have made her one of the finest and funniest practitioners of the monologue in poetry.Yet, notably in the poems charting her father’s illness and death, she can also strike an elegiac and heartbreaking note, while her poems set in the court of Heian Japan unscroll with great poignancy and delicacy. Among the most admired poets of her generation - whose work has been championed by Wendy Cope, George Szirtes, Selima Hill and Carol Ann Duffy - Julie O’Callaghan writes poems which ’seem effortless and are immediately accessible and yet achieve great emotional weight by the lightest of means’ (Michael Hartnett Award citation). Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Born in Chicago in 1954, Julie O’Callaghan has lived in Ireland since 1974. Her collections of poetry include Edible Anecdotes (Dolmen Press, 1983), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; What’s What (Bloodaxe Books, 1991), a Poetry Book Society Choice; No Can Do (Bloodaxe Books, 2000), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; Tell Me This Is Normal: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; and Magnum Mysterium (Bloodaxe Books, 2020). Her books of poetry for older children include Taking My Pen for a Walk (Orchard Books, 1988), Two Barks (Bloodaxe Books, 1998) and The Book of Whispers (Faber & Faber, 2006). She has received the Michael Hartnett Award for poetry and is a member of the Irish academy of arts, Aosdána.