Niall O'Sullivan – Poet

Against Confession I’m yet to write a real drunken sonnet spill my hot guts onto a tidy square, frayed at the edges, lines dripping like rare neck cutlets, flame-seared, fresh from the skillet to be devoured by some emo-gannets without spilling a drop on their couture, and barely filled they’d doubtless order more— some brains [...]

the gaps, the silence Pity the poor ape that stares upwards from the crust of his round gravity well to view the universe expanding outwards, the silent toll of its own heat-death knell, and seeks to find another mind behind it, a mind that happens to be quite like ours; a finger snap from which [...]

Saturday Morning The solemn silence of the pharmacy: haemorrhoid cream sits snug in pristine tubes next to tastefully designed tubs of lube. And though it’s not exactly privacy, the silence offers up its clemency— the counter doubles as confession booth for wronged lovers who only seek to sooth the itching price of their intimacy. But [...]

Werewolf of London But remember this Dr Glendun, the werewolf instinctively seeks to kill the thing it loves best. -Dr Yogami (Werewolf of London, 1935) On conquering the heights of that stark peak, in search of the mariphasa flower that only blooms during the moonlit hours, I was attacked by some carpet-faced freak. And though [...]

The Smile   The smile I want to stamp into the ground is older than the triumph of ninety-seven, it’s older than its name, body, even older than the gratifying sound of promises to nail it this time round and not repeat the mistakes of heathen predecessors. But this clean-shaven boat peers from store fronts [...]

Just a few days now before the hoped-for avalanche of sonnets arrives. I thought about having a practice run by writing a few sonnets privately to warm up with, but after about two it just didn’t feel right. Like a lot of things I find myself doing in this life, practise just seems to take [...]

Belated apologies for the lack of recent new content. Marriage, honeymoon, a return to Wimbledon, Latitude and laziness have conspired to keep me from my dedicated shedful of followers. However, that is about to change. For the whole month of September, I am going to be your sonnet hack. That’s right, I will be posting [...]

I had the honour of hanging out with Todd Moore for a couple of days when he came over to London a few years back. All I really knew of Todd Moore was from the terse Dillinger vignettes that appeared regularly in Tim Wells’s Rising magazine. The poems seemed to scan the contents of a moment, much [...]

I think that there is something more to memorizing a poem than helping out performance, I think that there is something natural about it, something wedded to poetry as a natural product of the human mind, something wedded to the poem’s natural history. Memorising a poem is in some ways more of a completion of a poem than the publication, it is a return to the source.

I might have never finished my degree in Fine Art ( live the cliché!) all those years back, but I’ve got that bit closer to being exhibited by the Tate than my fellow ponces. That’s right, yours truly has written the Poem of the Month on the Tate’s magazine website. The poem is based on [...]