Gregory O'Donoghue: Gregory O'Donoghue was born in the Ballinlough suburb of Cork city in 1951.
The eldest of five brothers, his father Robert was literature editor of the Cork Examiner newspaper and a widely published poet, his mother Anne a gentle but firm head of the household.
Greg went to school at Christian CBC where he is remembered as being studious but single-minded.
He went on to study for an MA at UCC under poet/professors John Montague and Seán Lucy, one of "that remarkable generation" (Thomas Dillon Redshaw) that included Greg Delanty, Thomas McCarthy, Gerry Murphy and Maurice Riordan, who were to become his lifelong friends and confidantes.
One of the youngest contributors to the Faber Book of Irish Verse, a first collection Kicking (Gallery) was published in 1975 when he was aged 20.
An itch for real life experience which his father Bobby recognised in his precocious son from an early age took him to Canada, where he studied for a doctorate and later taught at Queen's College, Ontario.
Frustration at a long barren spell that stumped his creativity led him to recross the Atlantic in the early 1980s.
A deep-seated need to experience "real life", as distinct from the academic, led him to manual labouring work on the railways.
In his "cups" he would say that he "worked freight trains between South Derbyshire and King's Cross".
It was an experience that left an indelible impression, and would recur again and again, with images of derelict stations, ghostly tracks, arrival and departures peppering his later poems.
"Midnight. Only myself and a white-haired woman.
Have been set down at a dismanned rural station.
I watch her cross the tracks and fade
Up a slope, vanish in a blur of conifers . . ."
His return to Cork in the early 1990s coincided with the return of that other renowned rebel émigré, Patrick Galvin.
A remarkable bond developed between the two, kindred spirits - boulevardiers who brought a swagger and often an argument to a somewhat derelict city still reeling from the 1980s' depression.
The establishment of the Munster Literature (the brainchild of Mary Johnston) around a group of writers including Liz O'Donoghue, Gerry Murphy and Patrick Cotter triggered a creative rejuvenation that found expression in the literary magazine Southword, with Greg O'Donoghue as poetry editor.
O'Donoghue's decision to become a full-time professional poet - influenced perhaps by Michael Hartnett's clarion call in his book A Farewell to English for a return to the fully-lived ideals of the poetic life - resulted in a remarkable creative flowering.
An interim collection, The Permanent Way (Three Spires), was published in 1996 and a long-awaited and celebrated collection, Making Tracks (Dedalus), in 2001 .
His seemingly endless poetic knowledge, coupled with a rigorous but intuitive feel for talent, attracted both aspiring and seasoned writers to a weekly workshop or "session" that grew up around him. His Thursday clinics (peppered by verbal tiffs with sparring partner Gerry Murphy or whoever else had the bottle to have a go) became a baptism of fire, the integrity of which fledgling wordsmiths would have to endure before being accepted into the writing fraternity.
Constant but never intrusive, he was a pivotal figure in Cork's year as European city of culture. Fate ordained that his translation of Bulgarian poet Kristin Dimitrova would be the first of the year-long series to be published. A book singled out for special mention by Irish Books Review (summer edition), it was to set the benchmark for the remaining 12 in the series.
A new collection of poems was ready when he was unexpectedly taken, and will be published posthumously by Dedalus.
At heart an émigré, the last of a generation who believed in the potential of poetry to bring about radical social and individual change, a loner but convivial, truculent on occasion but tender and sympathetic to a fault, singular in his passion for his chosen craft - his death leaves a real void among his legion (how he'd hate the pretension of that word) of friends and admirers.
Gregory O'Donoghue: born 1951; died August 27th, 2005