Waiting for the Angel, Thomas McGrath's most recent book of poems, is about the past and about the expectation of death, among other things. It is also about an effort to "angelize the demons," as McGrath says in an as yet unpublished portion of the third part of his Letter to an Imaginary Friend…. The past as shaping force, death as personal and political fact, the horror and loneliness of living in an inhuman and dehumanizing society—all these have been the stuff of McGrath's twelve or more volumes of published poetry. In Waiting for the Angel these themes remain, though some new ones are added, and the effort is to make much that is demonic in the world McGrath perceives more "angelic," that is, more humanized and bearable. New in this volume is an elegiac note which I have not heard sounded in McGrath's work before, and...