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Caitrìona O’Reilly : From ecopoetry to ontopoetics

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Caitrìona O'Reilly's poetry is remarkable for its attention to the natural world, to fauna, flora, the four elements and landscapes; for its keen sense of nature's superior and mysterious beauty ("Atlantic", "Octopus", "Six Landscapes", "Bee on Agastache") but also fragility ("Polar", "Iceland"). Without question, it can be described as "ecopoetry". I will explore the fundamentals of O’Reilly’s "eco-conscious" and scholarly work, and show how, in her work, "ecopoetry" amounts to "ontopoetics", which is to be understood as "poetics of being". The natural world captured poetically by Caitrìona O'Reilly is a "perceived" world, i.e. a world seen, observed, felt, touched, heard by a subject. These perceptions - which take precedence over concepts in O'Reilly's work - inform us not only about the world, but above all about the subject who perceives it, and underlie a metaphysical reflection on the being, its subjectivity, its relationship to the other and to the world.