The Five Quintets unfolds slowly, the steady self-revealing of insights that catch the edge of thought and provoke an arrest of mind—the fruit of a life in languages and words and depth of perception in wisdom.
Jeremy Begbie
The Five Quintets is perhaps best described as a mammoth poetic adventure undertaken by the celebrated poet Micheal O’Siadhail, representing the culmination of an extraordinary life’s work. The project is vast in scope. O’Siadhail attempts nothing less than an exploration of the predicaments of Western modernity as they appear in five fields of human endeavor: science, arts, economics, politics, and philosophy, and theology.
Mary McAleese
Whatever you have planned for next weekend, change it and make space to read this book. Your heart and mind and soul will thank you. This swirling work of love for humanity from Ireland's most exceptional romantic love poet will take you from the paralysis of our visionless future to a place where 'every bole and limb begins to dance the universe's light fantastic prayer.'
Brian Friel
I am in awe of the whole enterprise—the magnitude of it, the daring of it, and the easy competence of it.
Peter Ochs
An unparalleled book of instruction for a troubled age, The Five Quintets retrieves and exhibits human gifts our own age may have lost, like the power to measure the merely probable or to shape verses whose pulse draws us to love. A book of poetry in the category of the epic, the encyclopedic, and the sacred.
Paul Mealor
As a composer of choral music, I try to allow the sung and the repeated word to point to new dimensions of awareness, contrition, joy, or grief. These astonishing words in their settings, combinations, repetitions, and choices resonate with my own efforts on a very special, spiritual and different medium, and I welcome and applaud them. They are of international significance.
Martin Rees
The Five Quintets celebrates how the threads of our culture are woven together across the continents in a grand tradition extending back many centuries. As an astronomer, I resonate specially with a poet who acclaims science alongside humanistic culture. He celebrates the succession of great individuals who have probed the wonders and mysteries of our natural world—and what lies beyond. Nobody else could have created a work like this.
Stanley Hauerwas
Micheal O'Siadhail has done nothing less than give us a poetic account of that strange character called 'modernity.' He seems to have read everything, but more significantly, he has transformed what he has read through poetic narratives in the manner of Dante. This is a beautiful book of hope because of O'Siadhail's unrelenting passion to tell us the truth.
Jerry White
With astonishing depth, breadth, and creative range, O’Siadhail interweaves paradox and contradiction across the centuries, conversing with history’s greatest minds and evolutionary agents. This masterwork delivers a layered feast of wisdom and insight to inspire lovers of words, ideas, and action. Historians, politicians, artists, theologians, and economists alike will be delighted and nourished by this poetic tour de force.
John Wood
As a scientist I am thrilled at the way The Five Quintets weaves the history and the individuals involved up to the present time into a rich poetic fabric which is remarkable in its depth of understanding, yet leaves the reader with a sense of awe and mystery. The reader is invited to immerse into this world and enjoy the pleasures therein.
David Ford
O’Siadhail not only immerses us in a fascinating period of history—the past few hundred years up to the present, with its discoveries, traumas, transformations, and artistic creativity—in addition, in musical and beautifully crafted language, he brings history to life through one key person after another and offers matured, prophetic insight for the twenty-first century. The result is daring, moving, and profoundly relevant to anyone seeking personal and public wisdom today.
Jean Vanier
This is not an ordinary book of poems. It brings a vision of hope, an understanding about the evolution of our society in words of grace. Micheal leads us on to a road of peace.
Robert Pollack
Micheal O’Siadhail’s The Five Quintets takes the premise of Dante’s Divine Comedy and brings it into the current day. This epic poem is rich in language, complex in meter, but astoundingly modest in rhetoric. As Dante brought us to the circles of Hell, O’Siadhail brings us to the pinnacles of modernity. And as Dante brought out the humanity in characters of myth, O’Siadhail brings us to confront the humanity of the creators of today’s dreams of perfection—scientists, economists, artists all get their due. Somehow he manages to explain how each one’s work may approach perfection, even as he recognizes the humanity, incompleteness, and mortality of them all. It is a great work of humble humanism.
Justin Welby
The Five Quintets unfolds slowly, the steady self-revealing of insights that catch the edge of thought and provoke an arrest of mind—the fruit of a life in languages and words and depth of perception in wisdom.
N. T. Wright
Imagine a dream in which the makers and shakers of the modern world appeared, large as life, explaining what they were doing and what it meant: not just artists, musicians, poets, writers, and philosophers, but also scientists, economists, and politicians, all contributing, like the characters in Dante, to pull the world upwards or downwards. Now imagine the whole thing in flowing, vivid verse, arranged in five great sequences each with its own inner coherence and subtle blend of poetic form, climaxing with a gloriously unexpected heavenly conversation between modern saints. O’Siadhail has always invited us to taste the rich abundance of life. Now, in the best traditions of Irish hospitality, he spreads a lavish banquet for the ear, the intellect, and above all for the heart.
Serene Jones
Wading boldly into the murky waters of the past and its still swirling, dangerous depths, O’Siadhail offers us an angle of vision for the future that he invites us to create as he also gracefully enacts its unfolding. It is the perfect poetic intervention into the monstrous imperfections and possibilities of the present political moment.
David Donoghue
In The Five Quintets, Micheal O’Siadhail takes us on an exhilarating journey through four centuries of modern thought and sensibility. This is an extraordinarily ambitious project, but it is richly realized. If the sweep of O’Siadhail’s interests is epic, the insights afforded into the achievements of some of the period’s greatest literary and artistic figures reflect a deeply personal engagement. Moving effortlessly across several literatures and cultures, he embarks on an absorbing personal odyssey.
