“These are the clean, contained poems of a true poet. Again and again, with seeming effortlessness, they strike a perfect balance between straightforwardness and elegance. Their range is vast, their knowledge deep.”
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.”
This Book is available for pre-order until May 10th, 2025.
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Thomas O’Grady
Thomas O’Grady was born and grew up on Prince Edward Island. After a long and rich teaching career at University of Massachusetts Boston, where he was Director of Irish Studies from 1984 to 2019, he relocated to northern Indiana where he is currently Scholar-in- Residence at Saint Mary’s College. He now divides his time between and among the banks of the mighty St. Joe River in South Bend, a converted rumrunner’s bunkhouse in Adamsville, Rhode Island, and the south shore of his beloved PEI.
