Waiting for the Mason

“Waiting for the Mason, Tony O’Dwyer’s eagerly anticipated second collection, has much to say about life, love, mortality, landscape and memory. These supremely well-crafted poems, quietly understated on the page, reveal rare depth, vision and empathy. They are also a delight to read aloud. Waiting for the Mason confirms Tony O’Dwyer as one of our finest poets, whose deeply rewarding work deserves to be celebrated far and wide.”   Patrick Chapman

“In his finely imagined memorial poem ‘Apothecary’, Tony O’Dwyer describes the eponymous pharmacist engaged in the minutiae of his vocation. It is an image that might serve well for the poet himself. One imagines O’Dwyer drawing on a store of refined and precise vocabulary, and on his own banks of experience, craft and patience, to formulate the poems of Waiting for the Mason. Robert Lowell counsels himself to "pray for the grace of accuracy"; these are just such ‘accurate’ poems. Whether bringing us to Timbuktu or Xenephon’s Asia Minor, to the Ennistymon and Lahinch of childhood or into the mind of a London bomber, they ask for and repay the closest of readings.”   David Butler

“A deep stream of empathy runs though the landscape and its inhabitants, human and otherwise, that inform this stirring collection.  Life and death sometimes projected as a dream are often indistinguishable. O'Dwyer is a poet of compassion and hard truths.  His new book flames with the beauty and eccentricities that characterize his homeland.” Susan Isla Tepper, author of Hair Of A Fallen Angel

“Everyone should carry a copy of Waiting for the Mason as an antidote to despair. The poet elevates one's sense that being human may, for once, be quite a good condition. Passion and beauty radiate from visionary phrasing, a delight in language, and an honesty of feeling, as boyhood, seasonal rhythms and the rites of daily passage are attended to. O'Dwyer places human sensibility in historical contexts too, sometimes colonial, yet he continues to praise the human journey with the utmost delicacy. This is essential reading from a poet of great and sensitive authority.”   Mary O'Donnell