Our Double Time ranges through tradition and renewal, lovemaking and gratitude, sufferings and secrets, birth and death, music and abundance. Like much of O’Siadhail’s work, these poems resonate with a jazz-like vitality, both light and dark. Each poem is a motif expanding into movements that culminate in this glorious symphony in double time.

‘From writing about personal experience Micheal O’Siadhail has moved to writing about the world. His poems, especially when he speaks of love, express tenderness – remarkable in a time when poets seem afraid to write with feeling. He works in skilful verse forms, yet his language is so suited to the thought as to seem perfectly natural. A delightful poet – I don’t know of any other who writes with such affection of the every day, our changing mood and chances’ – Louis Simpson.

‘This is powerful life-affirming poetry which is by turns urgent, reflective, terrified and loving…These are poems that celebrate life, that confront and revitalise the old themes of love, loss, memory and desire and do so in a variety of verse forms. They are tender, vulnerable and defiant’ – Paul Donnelly, Poetry Quarterly Review