John O'Donnell has won the Hennessy/Sunday Tribune Award for Poetry and the Listowel Writers' Week prizes for Best Poem and Best Collection. A previous collection, Some Other Country, was published by Bradshaw Books in 2002. In that year he won the SeaCat Irish National Poetry Prize.

About Icarus Sees His Father Fly:

"...assured, well-made, confident, unpretentious. All of these poems are solid and palpable, with a sure touch and images that work."
—Nial MacMonagle, Rattlebag

"The writing shows great maturity and control. A strong sense of the outside world, a sense of belonging to the global village informs O'Donnell's work as well."
—Thomas McCarthy, Cork Literary Review

"He has taken great care in crafting these short poems; images and details carefuly selected and arranged, cadences shadowing the iambic base-rhythms...Perhaps Larkin's shadow hovers over poems like these..."
—James J. McAuley, The Irish Times