Dennis O’Driscoll

His other great theme was work. His youth and early employment combined the two: he had lost both parents when he was 20, and had to provide for his younger siblings. On his 16th birthday he began work in the Irish Civil Service, calculating death duties.

His last collection, Dear Life (2012), contains free and meditative poems about age and the only end of age; the poet characteristically plays with the jargon of the office in a way that sometimes seems like parody, but is just as often a straightforward reflection of how O’Driscoll saw the world.

In this vein, death will approach people “undermining their / confidence in the future, dictating their fate, / altering conditions of service in mid-contract, / suffering life to carry on without them.” His books have telling, clerical titles such as Hidden Extras and Exemplary Damages.

Among lovers of poetry, he will be remembered as much for his encouragement of other poets as for his own work. He was a voracious and thorough reader of poetry periodicals, and remembered all he read. O’Driscoll corresponded prolifically with other poets, frequently with enthusiasm for a new publication, in the distinctive, clear, capital letters that one fellow poet described as “aggressively legible”.

He had the rare distinction of being a teetotal Irish poet, and relished the sobriety of his role as a public servant, in one poem crowning himself “Lord of the Files”. Many enjoyed the warmth of his company – not least his colleagues from the Revenue Customs department . His close friend Seamus Heaney has written of O’Driscoll’s “merriment”.

Dennis O’Driscoll was born in Thurles, Co Tipperary, on January 1 1954, the son of a salesman. He said of his childhood home: “We were inland people with accents as flat as the landscape.” After his early start at the Office of Revenue Commissioners, he took a degree in Law at University College, Dublin.

His poetry earned early encouragement from Les Murray, and his first collection, Kist, appeared in 1982.

In it he wrote with the clarity of eastern European poets – he admired the Czech Miroslav Holub and the Pole Wislawa Szymborska for their lack of pretension. Personal responses to loss are interleaved with more universal ones; in his later, more spontaneous writing he was able to combine the two with breathtaking confidence. Still, from the beginning to the end of his career, he was able to reject faith while eloquently expressing a need for it.

O’Driscoll soon made a name for himself as a critic and essayist as well as a poet, and began reviewing poetry for the Irish journal Hibernia in 1977. (He was also a part-time editor of the more technical Tax Briefing.) He became a highly trusted interviewer, and the record of his extensive interviews with Seamus Heaney, Stepping Stones, appeared in 2008.

Having managed the Stamp Duties adjudication office in Dublin Castle, he moved to Revenue Customs. He became involved in the organisation’s planning and policymaking, and his increasing seniority enabled him to travel, often to conferences for EU revenue departments.

His retirement, to Naas, Co Kildare, was a pragmatic move, but one which some felt would rob him of the work that had become so helpful to his writing. But Dear Life showed him in full flow, especially as he confronted the possibility of his own death: it “begins to seem a feasible / proposition, a viable option. / I... meet the job spec.” .

For all that, his death came suddenly. His funeral was attended by Seamus Heaney, and by the President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins. Julie O’Callaghan, whom he married in 1985, survives him.

Dennis O’Driscoll, born January 1 1954, died December 24 2012