Coming Ashore - Thomas O'grady

nA 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.n