Menagerie – out now!
All publicity/appearance requests for my new poetry collection Menagerie to arlenhouse@gmail.com
Order Menagerie HERE
Irish writer Nuala O’Connor’s fifth poetry collection, Menagerie, was published March 2025 by Arlen House.
Her novel Seaborne was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards
and nominated for the Dublin Literary Award.
Her bestselling novel NORA, about Nora Barnacle and James Joyce, was named a
Top 10 historical novel in the New York Times and was the One Dublin One Book choice for 2022.
PRAISE FOR MENAGERIE:
‘…a warm feelingful generosity of vision and a distant, diagnostic eye…a collection which is at once involving and clear-sighted.’ The Irish Times
‘Her narratives might be composed in straight lines but they are nothing of the kind, offering a kind of detailed and direct meandering into and through struggle, complexity and ease. These poems are quite magical, honestly.’ Rob McLennan
‘Nuala O’Connor’s Menagerie is as wild as it gets: a kaleidoscopic collection of beautiful forms and patternings. She has narrative gifts in abundance and can swing effortlessly from folktale to allegory to prayer to fable to scientific nugget. So many fascinating byroads & loanings, back alleys & shortcuts, motorways & roundabouts, avenues & promenades for readers to ramble and be amazed. At its tender heart is a deep compassion for the plight of creatures, including us humans, and the dramas we spin about ourselves.’ Paula Meehan
‘There is something beguiling and mesmeric in the wide ranging carnival of language that is so unfailingly satisfying in Nuala O’Connor’s welcome new collection of poems, Menagerie. Exquisitely ordered, with acute tenderness and loss at their heart, these poems insinuate themselves under our skin. They often ask us to stand on our heads, or flip the very world – and its words – upside down, the better to know it. Powerful, beautiful, necessary work.’. Geraldine Mitchell
‘Real and surreal, cerebral and deeply felt, the poems in Nuala O’Connor’s latest collection pulsate with narrative intensity and vivid imagery. The creatures in her extraordinary menagerie are multi-specied and multi-faceted; each rendition demonstrates the writer’s ability to empathise with the other, be it animal, mineral or human. If E.M. Forster urged us to ‘only connect’, O’Connor shows those connections in their impressive variety, reminding us in the process of our own responsibilities as beings who share the planet and who have done so much to destroy it. Formally inventive and politically aware, concerned with aesthetics as much as what it means to be human, these poems work by association, each successive echo deepening our engagement with O’Connor’s unique voice and way of seeing. If she is, as she says, ‘language-hooked’, so too is her reader, mesmerised in her wake.’ Nessa O’Mahony
‘MENAGERIE, is a new and stunning collection of poetry by Nuala O’Connor. The dance of her unique intellect is ever present. A poet at home in the world of her thoughts, she creates her own myths, beats her own rhythms. Her poems journey between the familiar and the strange. Her distinct vocabulary is memorable. Strings of lines create wonderment and joyful noises. Imaginative, emotional and expressive, her images unfold with ease. Always refreshingly new: “Menagerie” by Nuala O’Connor is filled with acute observations and lyrical beauty.’ Noel Monahan.
‘Celebrated as a novelist with a lyrical style, Nuala O’Connor has always been a quietly showstopping poet as well. In Menagerie, we are struck by the compassion with which she reaches back into memory to hold hands with the lost. And even as she reflects that “there is no happy ever after, only once upon a time”, she takes us vividly into the places where those two points fleetingly connect. Fired with a rare imagination, Menagerie is playful, spry, and rich in myth. Here is a true poet, one with a storyteller’s eye.’ Patrick Chapman