Richard Murphy is one of a small number of Irish poets who came to international recognition in the gradual revival of Irish literature that took place in the 1950s and 1960s. His contemporaries included Thomas Kinsella and John Montague; his predecessors Austin Clarke and Patrick Kavanagh. What made his work different from theirs were the themes of ancestry, history, and place that characterized it from the beginning, its neomodernist form and its urbanity of manner. Richard Murphy had the distinction, quite unusual in the new generation of writers, of having been born into the Protestant-Irish Ascendancy class, of having been educated mainly in England, and of feeling a need to reach across the sectarian, social, and cultural divisions of Irish life so that he could find imaginative enrichment among the "native" Irish of the countryside. The search for that harmony of separate and different elements in his background...