Des Donnelly is an Irish poet born, raised, and residing in Co Tyrone.
Born in 1955, Donnelly’s writing life has moved between the factual, the technical, and the imaginative. Each mode sharpened his attention to structure and pattern and to the way language stores meaning, distorts it, and occasionally breaks under its own weight. His poetry arises from the same impulse: a long fascination with how ideas hold together and where they fail.
Over several decades he has created poems, systems, fragments, and conceptual experiments that accumulate into what he calls a mass of work that bends thought toward it rather than seeking attention. In this model, every piece adds weight: the poems, the philosophical notes, the humour, the marginalia, the technical experiments, the failures, the inventions. Nothing is wasted. Everything contributes to the field.
Donnelly’s work is guided with a framework he calls Creative Gravity - a theory that emerged organically from the long arc of his writing life. In this view, the archive is not a collection but a curvature: each piece alters the shape of the whole, and nothing is ever wasted.
