We Are Not in the World: Fleeting lives caught in passing

Like his poetry, Conor O’Callaghan’s novel about the refugee crisis is delicately written and hauntingly imagined

Conor O’Callaghan’s prose is, like his poetry, densely rhythmic and highly compact

FICTION

We Are Not in the World

By Conor O’Callaghan

Doubleday, €13.99

The prose of poets, Susan Sontag once wrote, has “a particular fervour, density, velocity, fibre”. Its typical tone is “elegiac, retrospective”.

What this means is that prose by poets is often mood prose – less interested in argument or story than in fine-grained details of atmosphere and feeling. When poets write novels, they tend to be light in action and heavy in place, ...