Desmond O'Grady has enjoyed for more than twenty-five years a productive international career as a poet and educator. He has been one of a group of Irish poets who, after Denis Devlin and Patrick Kavanagh, have worked to bring Irish poetry out of the shadow of Yeats. Among this number, O'Grady occupies a chronological pivot point: he is some six or seven years younger than Richard Murphy, Thomas Kinsella, and John Montague; some four or five years older than Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon. O'Grady's strategy in creating his own voice and his own subject has been to unite his concerns as a contemporary Irishman with a larger perspective in both space and time. He has lived, studied, and taught in America, on the Continent, and even in the Near East, writing poetry that he sees not as exclusively Irish, but "in the European mainstream." O'Grady...