Coming Ashore

"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 from the wealth of his first two volumes, and adding a rich bounty of recent work gathered under the title Nuages, O'Grady's New & Selected Poems continues his exploration of place, memory, and the transient and transcendent wonder of the everyday. With a painter's eye and a philosopher's temperament, he conjures a living landscape in which an egret "stands tall and bright as a wand" and the simple yet enduring values of rustic life are on radiant display. 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 heel has been assigned. / But take heart too: I married mine." Meditating on mutability along with our timeless longing for significance, O'Grady's poems celebrate the resilience of the embodied spirit, a space wherein "a scorched wasteland sprouts green shoots of life" and "The turning world will spawn its own rebirth."