File:Professor Michael O'Neill.jpg

English: It was a pleasure to be in the audience at a recent St.Cuthbert's Senior Common Room reading where Michael O'Neill and Jacek Dehnel the Polish poet, translator and editor read from their works. Here Michael O'Neill is signing my copy of his collection; The Stripped Bed. He read from that and from his later collection: Wheel, from which his following poem is an exampler:

NORFOLK

Sand-martins whirling out of cliffs. Hay trussed in roly-poly bales.

Stalled windmills. Big Skies. A place for weather-watching rites, for money

to invest in, rewarding itself with the obligatory boat and a lawn

that tapers off in search of water, life's elixir, leisure's mirror... Walsingham

and Cromer: the manufactured shrine with something - nothingness? -- candled at its heart,

the deft resort with one eye on your wallet and one on the enigma of the sky

that bends above the threatened beach where if, as they heap and spill, drag and heap,

the waves are trying to communicate - some maxim, perhaps concerning survival,

the need to endure, to hope just enough - to find you're baffled, you can't hear a word.

Michael O'Neil is Professor of English at Durham University, his poetry has been recognised by an Eric Gregory Award and a Cholmondeley Award.