One Crimson Thread

by Micheal O'Siadhail

Overview

For twenty years, celebrated poet Micheal O’Siadhail’s beloved wife, Bríd, suffered from Parkinson’s disease. O’Siadhail’s verses explore the ordinary triumph of human fidelity and sound the depths of parting through a 150-sonnet sequence in which love faces wasting illness and the specter of death. There is tenderness, intensity, and gratitude—which will resonate with all who know both love and loss.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781481307802
Publisher:	Baylor University Press
Publication date:	08/15/2017
Pages:	164
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Micheal O’Siadhail is an internationally acclaimed poet whose Collected Poems, gathering together thirteen collections, was published in 2015. Married for forty-three years, he chronicles in One Crimson Thread the last two years of his wife’s life, her death, and his grief. He now lives and works in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

O’Siadhail seems to rise to a new intensity of writing and analysis in this collection. This is both a searing and a beautiful interrogation... it offers immense compassion and consolation.

Church Times - Martyn Halsall

One of the most emotionally compelling books of poetry I’ve read in a long time, the sequence chronicles the final two years of a forty-year marriage, as the poet’s beloved wife... The privilege of witnessing the hard but redemptive reality this couple had to face is one of the great gifts this remarkable book provides.

The Hopkins Review - David M. Katz

I read slowly, carefully, and with deep emotion One Crimson Thread. It’s a beautiful, beautiful but terribly sad poem of love.

Jean Vanier

O’Siadhail is skilled at his craft. And though some of the sonnets stand out more than others, the total effect is a compelling, rhythmic ritual of commemoration and grief. His book is a valuable and unusual addition to the literature of illness, caregiving, death, and grieving, inviting believers and unbelievers alike to remember that though we must 'endure our going hence,' graces lie along that hard way like alpine flowers that weather the hardest wind.

Christian Scholar's Review - Marilyn McEntyre

One Crimson Thread is a compelling, intimate, and memorable body of heartfelt poetry.

Midwest Book Review The Poetry Shelf

The images conjured by the poet are so vivid that I feel I have been to the place where she lives for the few months before she dies…I think those who have loved ones who have Parkinson’s disease would learn more from reading this poem than reading swathes of medical literature, and likewise professionals can only benefit from the emotional understanding gained from reading and re-reading this poem.

Journal of Geriatric Care and Research - Teresa Black

One Crimson Thread, a beautiful, tender and heartbreaking series of poems that chronicle the last two years of Bríd's life, her death and his grief.

Sunday Independent - Andrea Smith

It is the biography of a marriage and one of the most elegant pictures of faithfulness that I have ever encountered in all my years of reading…This is an extraordinary collection; a portrait of love and of a poet’s immortal faithfulness.

The Irish Examiner - Thomas McCarthy

Micheal O’Siadhail is one of Ireland’s finest poets…but his latest collection of poems is perhaps his most personal and affecting yet.

Miriam O’Callaghan

This is poetry that is deeply human and accessible, beautifully observed, honest and technically controlled.

Catholic Herald - Francis Phillips

Micheal O’Siadhail is one of Ireland’s finest poets…but his latest collection of poems is perhaps his most personal and affecting yet.

Miriam O’Callaghan

It’s about his wife Bríd, who died of Parkinson’s disease, and it traces her last months, her death and his grieving, but it’s uplifting. They’re sonnets, 150 sonnets, and they're the most beautiful poems, so I'd recommend them to anybody...a wonderful, wonderful book. It’s called

BBC Radio 3 - Rob Cowan

The journal is in part O’Siadhail’s testimony to his wife’s spirit in the face of a terrible disease, a disease which of its nature makes war on human dignity. The poems bear witness to the couple’s past life and love together, asserting a persisting strength against that of the disease.

Dublin Review of Books - Brendan Lowe

As a child I lost my grandfather to Parkinson’s disease and so I approached the veteran Irish poet Micheal O’Siadhail’s One Crimson Thread with some trepidation. But the opening sonnet drew me in and I read the book in one sitting—something I rarely do with poetry. I read closely. I read with tears in my eyes…O’Siadhail writes without sentimentality or schmaltz. This is a tough book…And in writing this most touching love poem, O’Siadhail has also made a strong case for our prioritising the quality of social care.. which enables people to live in love until the very end of their lives.

Envoi - Sheila Wild

This collection of sonnets is not to be read without being affected, impacted, influenced and changed….He writes carefully, tentatively, but also extremely clearly and directly, naming the things and disturbing the places that hurt….With full poetic art, [he] versifies, for example, the rhyme and assonance tradition of Irish and Welsh lyrics since the early Middle Ages, [and] perhaps also versifies with the quality of Shakespeare’s sonnets. With each missing rhyme, the farther away his wife is, the more he fights and despairs.

Buch und Sofa

At the heart of this sequence, the poems courageously show how the couple’s deep- rooted love searches to overcome her illness, their fear and dread, and their eventual loss.

New Hibernia Review - Joseph Heininger