Coming Ashore

<p>A true poet was how Mark Strand described Thomas O'Grady. About the poems in his first book <em>What Really Matters</em> 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 <em>Nuages</em> O'Grady's <em>New & Selected Poems</em> 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.</p>