Photosynthesis

Photosynthesis is Laurence O’Dwyer’s fourth collection, drawing on three epic odysseys  –  from Mexico to the Atacama Desert, the Balkans to the Black Sea and taking us finally through an Arctic summer and winter of Scandinavia. 

Real, imagined and historical journeys merge in the long poem, Nappstraumtunel, telling the story of Charles V of Spain and his rivalry with the Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire.

Stories from five centuries ago alight on the present day; we meet a cast of locals,  foreigners and misfits – Norwegian Grethe and Danish Grethe wintering out in the Kunstnerhuset (Artist’s House) in Lofoten, Miroslav, an engineer from Bosnia fixing telecommunication signals in the North, a chicken tycoon from Serbia and a clown whose professional equipment is tax-deductible under Norwegian law.

LISTEN

Photosynthesis

 from Photosynthesis

'In the 20th century, the Royal Society received seven hundred

and twenty-nine patent applications for perpetual mobile machines.

All failed a simple test: can we make money from these things?

Only trees have worked it out – putting light together with light.

What is elegant and simple is infinitely complex.'

~

Laurence O’Dwyer has published three previous collections of poetry, Tractography (2018), The Lighthouse Journal  (2020) and Catalan Butterflies (2022). Working with the photographer, Millee Tibbs, he created an artist’s book, Mount Analogue, featuring essays and poems that respond to Tibbs’ photography from the Alps. For film, he wrote the script of Great Refractor (2022) which was directed by Andy Graydon. His distinctions include the Patrick Kavanagh Award, the Ireland Chair of Poetry Project Award, a Hennessy New Irish Writing Award and a Literature Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland. He has received fellowships from MacDowell, the Bogliasco Foundation and the Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Trust. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from Trinity College Dublin.