Description
The poems in Threads, Ruth O’Callaghan’s seventeenth collection of poetry, address both the personal and political. They are sometimes ironical and at others metaphorical, but they consistently engage the reader in contemplating the fact that ‘Ours are simply steps that have disturbed / dust others have left’.
Ruth O’Callaghan. Paperback, 210 x 135 mm, 96 pages, May 2026.
From reviews of Where Shadow Falls:
‘Where Shadow Falls is a fabulous book with a poet who is on top form and a consummate purveyor of the ‘craft or sullen art’ of poetry. Ruth O’Callaghan is equally at ease with beautifully realised ‘observational’ poems and the philosophical, often mixing successfully the two. The personal and the political merge, coalesce and they are underlined with a poet whose sensibilities are wide ranging in their compassion and backlit by a wry, ironic humour that breaks through as the lucky reader experiences in a poetry book, laughter, tears and gasps of admiration. A stunning collection’ — JACK CARADOC (Dreich)
‘This is one of the most challenging collections that SOUTH has ever asked me to review. Not an easy read in either subject matter or language…. As the title suggests darkness recurs, physical and metaphorical, often both….This combination of vivid scene setting with blurred emotive edge is characteristic throughout many of the poems: a woman waiting day after day for someone to arrive on the bus, wind-damaged camellias ‘left until you return’, and most remarkably, a shrivelled chilli in a fridge and potatoes whose tubers ‘I could not face excising’ — DAVID ASHBER (South)
About the author: Ruth O’Callaghan, a Hawthornden Fellow, international competition adjudicator, interviewer, reviewer, editor, workshop leader and mentor both in UK and abroad, has been hosting poetry venues in London for nearly two decades. She has compered, read, and co-organised at poetry festivals in the UK and abroad and has presented extensively in Asia, Europe and the USA, collaborating with other disciplines and nationalities including Mongolian women poets (sponsored by the Arts Council) which produced a book and CD. She has been awarded residencies in different European countries and at the XXX World Congress of Poets in Taiwan was awarded a gold medal. She has published seventeen full poetry collections. Her book of interviews with internationally eminent women poets has been said to be ‘a very important contribution to world literary history’ (Professor Clare Brant, University of London).
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