True to its title, the poems in O’Hagan’s second poetry collection, Anamnesis, allude to a world hovering at the edges of our minds, one that can be sensed and yet lies, teasingly, just beyond conscious reach. The arc of poems through time and distance represents a summoning up of, and immersion in, small moments which reveal themselves to be quietly momentous; a distillation of personal experience from which we feel there is something to be collectively gleaned. The recovery of memory in its various facets is explored, and the poetry that emerges is both poignant and lyrical.
‘Through the excavation of personal memories, O’Hagan shows how our inner worlds are kept alive and made coherent, turning keys of recall to unlock a deeper awareness of who we are, and why. Her finely nuanced and delicately wrought poems are eloquent testimony to the functioning of memory and its implications for creativity, reminding the reader how another’s exacting work of remembrance can illuminate our own.’
Jena Woodhouse
In a world of pretenders, O’Hagan’s is an authentic and powerful voice. Anamnesis engages the senses as entirely and effortlessly as if the poet herself had grasped your hand and softly whispered, ‘Come, see the world through my eyes.’
Dave Kavanagh
‘O’Hagan’s poetic voice is a complex, subtle, and authentic one that captures moods and behaviours with an intense and elegant analysis, and a searing insight into the stories we tell ourselves, what our memories conjure, and what lies beneath the force of forgetting.’
Linda Adair
Finalist in the Eric Hoffer Book Award (US) (Poetry Category), 2023.
Kate Maxwell (verified owner) –
‘Anamnesis’ is a stunning anthology. Denise O’Hagan has created a fluid and sensual collection- or recollection (as the title suggests) of love, grief, and ordinary beauty in the everyday, in the past, and in dreams. Her portraits and tales capture moments or emotions in perfectly selected details and exquisite clarity. You find yourself nodding, misty-eyed, or smiling as you are invited into her world of beautiful words and ideas. A book to read and return to time and again.
James Walton –
This is a book of luminous clarity, where the three senses of time meld with the daily and commonplace to produce wonderful reflections on remembrance, hope, loss, and being. One of the best collections I have read in many years, taking us deep within and without of ourselves, with an unbending beauty in the lines of words to slowly absorb.
The Rubery Award (verified owner) –
From the Rubery Award shortlist:
This collection addresses the extremes of human experience from birth to death. A mother’s funeral provides the subject for ‘Still the Rain Kept Falling’, a beautiful poem in which the deceased comments on her own funeral proceedings, and which closes with a reference to the earth that is ‘richer now for holding her’: it’s typical of O’Hagan’s measured, reflective verse, expressing intense emotions with effortless fluency. Many poems are painterly in their descriptive detail, such as the excellent ‘If I Could’, where the speaker’s desire to convey the wonder of the world to her child is set alongside her need to ameliorate the pain and insecurity of ill health (‘the butterfly palpation trapped in your chest’). The poems are often concerned with memory and the process of retrieval: this is something she explores in the opening poem, ‘Subtext’, where significance is found in place, and the scrupulously observed minutia of the material world (‘I’m talking of the dent in the hallway door/The cracked halo of paint around the handle of/The third cupboard on the kitchen’). O’Hagan’s penetrating vision is such that she sees subtexts that the rest of us miss, and this makes for an exquisite collection that deserves its place on the shortlist.
https://www.ruberybookaward.com/2023-winners.html