Francis O'Hare was born in Newry, Co. Down, in 1970. He co-authored a volume of poetry, Outside the Walls, with Frank Sewell, published by An Clochan Press, Belfast, in 1997. His first full collection, Falling into an O, was published by Lagan Press in 2007. A further pamphlet collection was published by Lagan Press in 2009, entitled

Alphaville. Lagan published his second collection Somewhere Else, in 2011. In the same year, he also published a collection in America, Home and Other Elsewheres, with Evening Street Press, Ohio. He has published poems in various journals in Ireland, the UK and the United States, including Poetry Ireland Review, Evening Street Review, The Galway Review, The Glasgow Review of Books, A New Ulster

Abridged, Honest UIsterman, The Burning Bush, The Blue Nib and The Yellow Nib.

Sailing to Omeath is a Yeatsian dream of escape from the mind-numbing banalities and demands of adult and modern life. In these poems the poet locates some temporary shelter from the storm in memories of childhood, sacred sites of personal

pilgrimage and life-affirming muses. If the dream often founders on the rocks of responsibility and reality, that is a price worth paying as the poet finds his ultimate safe harbour in the formal rites of poetry itself. If these poems offer the reader

anything it is the promise of Byzantium in a down to earth contemporary Irish context whilst recognising and celebrating the 'mere complexities that bind and bound us all.