Jeff Alessandrelli December 17, 2020
With the Covid-19 pandemic, there have obviously been dozens of books that haven’t received the shine they might have under normal circumstances. One in particular that I’ve enjoyed is Irish poet Laurence O’Dwyer‘s poetry collection
The Lighthouse Journal. A unique poetic travelogue of a kind,
The Lighthouse Journal largely centers on O’Dwyer’s experience working at a lighthouse in northern Norway. But the book is much more than that–it’s an ethnography, it’s an epic poem, it’s an app, it’s a narrative that twists and turns in the same way a distant light might appear to a ship lost at sea. Below O’Dwyer expounds on the writing of the volume and why the physical, tangible world should be as much a part of poetry as the mental, metaphorical one.