Coming Ashore by Thomas O’Grady
“A true poet” was how Mark Strand described Thomas O’Grady. About the poems in his first book, What Really Matters, Strand wrote: “Their range is vast, their knowledge deep.” A quarter of a century later, the observation rings truer than ever. Drawing on the best from his first two volumes, and with a healthy selection of brilliant new work, O’Grady’s Selected Poems continues his exploration of place, memory, and the transient, irresistible beauty of the everyday.
With a painter’s eye and a philosopher’s temperament, he conjures a living landscape in which an egret “stands tall as a wand” and the honorable and high demands of rustic life are given their due. At the same time there’s room for salubrious wit: “We are mortal. We all must fall....//Take heed, dear reader: to each of us/an Achilles heels has been assigned./But take heart too: I married mine.” The poems meditate on mutability, along with our timeless longing for meaning in poems that celebrate the resilience of the embodied spirit, wherein “a scorched wasteland sprouts green shoots of life/ The turning world will spawn its own rebirth.” The poet keeps us cresting epiphanies as he uncovers radiant meaning in what might otherwise pass for ordinary, harvesting “braided gold from a field of sodden grain.”
“A true poet” was how Mark Strand described Thomas O’Grady. About the poems in his first book, What Really Matters, Strand wrote: “Their range is vast, their knowledge deep.” A quarter of a century later, the observation rings truer than ever. Drawing on the best from his first two volumes, and with a healthy selection of brilliant new work, O’Grady’s Selected Poems continues his exploration of place, memory, and the transient, irresistible beauty of the everyday.
With a painter’s eye and a philosopher’s temperament, he conjures a living landscape in which an egret “stands tall as a wand” and the honorable and high demands of rustic life are given their due. At the same time there’s room for salubrious wit: “We are mortal. We all must fall....//Take heed, dear reader: to each of us/an Achilles heels has been assigned./But take heart too: I married mine.” The poems meditate on mutability, along with our timeless longing for meaning in poems that celebrate the resilience of the embodied spirit, wherein “a scorched wasteland sprouts green shoots of life/ The turning world will spawn its own rebirth.” The poet keeps us cresting epiphanies as he uncovers radiant meaning in what might otherwise pass for ordinary, harvesting “braided gold from a field of sodden grain.”
“A true poet” was how Mark Strand described Thomas O’Grady. About the poems in his first book, What Really Matters, Strand wrote: “Their range is vast, their knowledge deep.” A quarter of a century later, the observation rings truer than ever. Drawing on the best from his first two volumes, and with a healthy selection of brilliant new work, O’Grady’s Selected Poems continues his exploration of place, memory, and the transient, irresistible beauty of the everyday.
With a painter’s eye and a philosopher’s temperament, he conjures a living landscape in which an egret “stands tall as a wand” and the honorable and high demands of rustic life are given their due. At the same time there’s room for salubrious wit: “We are mortal. We all must fall....//Take heed, dear reader: to each of us/an Achilles heels has been assigned./But take heart too: I married mine.” The poems meditate on mutability, along with our timeless longing for meaning in poems that celebrate the resilience of the embodied spirit, wherein “a scorched wasteland sprouts green shoots of life/ The turning world will spawn its own rebirth.” The poet keeps us cresting epiphanies as he uncovers radiant meaning in what might otherwise pass for ordinary, harvesting “braided gold from a field of sodden grain.”
