Cornelius Buckley

This novel by Cornelius Buckley, a multi-award-winning writer, comes from a lifetime of dedicated writing, especially of poetry. One of his previous works The Last Irish Romantic, was launched by Gabriel Fitzmourice, the noted poet, at the Listowel literary festival. He described the collection as a striking series of works reminiscent of T. S Eliot and Michael Hartnett. The book was praised by the famous Dublin publisher and poet, Pat Boran, as a “truly distinctive distinctive debut volume”, and the noted British poet Bernard O’Donoghue described it as “brilliant”. Cornelius’s second collection, Poems from Heartlands, was published recently. It was uniquely innovative in that it contained both printed poems of note, but also hand-written poems woven into distinctive art work by the author, as in his original notebook sources. These encapsulate a lifetime of poetic and artistic work. The poet’s second collection, the color edition, received fulsome praise. It has been nominated for numerous awards, including the book of the year award, and has won the Pinnacle Book Achievement award, the San Francisco Literary Festival award for Poetry; the Author’s Circle Novel of Excellence award, and the Firebird book award. His latest collection, Journey into Light: New Art Poems, continues that brilliant innovative approach, what the poet calls “new art poetry”. The Cottage novel might also be called “new art prose”, in that it includes a lot of poetry as part of its plot and narrative. But this is not arbitrary, the poetry is part of the essence of its main character, a poet and university lecturer like Cornelius; there are elements of autobiography in the main character of the novel. But it also owes as lot to Agatha Christie and the mystery novel genre; the detective mystery solver in the work is a kind of British Hercule Poirot. This makes the novel more readable and entertaining, for the author believes literary work should be readable at several different levels. But the poetic quality makes The Cottage a unique trip into what the author would call poetic prose, woven into an exciting mystery narrative that should keep the reader entertained and guessing and enthralled to the end.

Cornelius Buckley is a graduate of St. Patrick’s College Maynooth, and has a doctorate from Oxford University, where he specialized in modern American literature. He has previously published two prose works, Wheels of Light and Learn from Me. The Cottage is his first venture into novel writing but he is preparing two other novels, sequels to The Cottage – The Mountain and The Island. They continue the innovative poetic prose departure and fascinating mystery quality.