Photo courtesy of Kristine Iwersen O'Daly
advanced praise for The New Gods:
In this, his first full-length volume, eminent translator and writer William O’Daly proves himself to be a poet of considerable gifts. Beautifully lyrical and poignantly evocative, O’Daly’s poems explore and illuminate the deepest questions of our existence, doing so with great sensitivity and astute insight. Whether he turns his attention to the birth of his daughter, the horrors of war, a marriage ceremony, the illusive quality of time, or the quiet splendor of the natural world, O’Daly’s poems shine with wisdom’s incandescent light.
~ Maurya Simon, author of The Wilderness: New and Selected Poems
“We need to sit on the rim/ of the well of darkness/,” Pablo Neruda wrote, “and fish for fallen light/ with patience.” In the poems of The New Gods, William O’Daly sits with us beside this well, each stunning metaphor shaping world after world of possibility. Here the dark currents of bitterness and grief, arrogance and war give way to the sweetness of a daughter’s questions or the shiver of a Sierra lake. From the charred rubble of Iraq to the snowy Andes of Neruda’s exile, O’Daly’s deep music guides us beyond the “machinery of destruction” into a new Parnassus where “every word blossoms erotic,” where heron, waterfall, moonlit pools, and sea all burn with the “inexhaustible light” of beauty and desire, and we “recognize this burning as our own.”
~ Terry Ehret, author of Lost Body and Night Sky Journey