By Michael Londra

You could say that Thomas O’Grady’s poems have the eyes of a horse — channeling history and mythology through the contemporary lens of poetry’s eternal present.

Coming Ashore: New & Selected Poems by Thomas O’Grady. Arrowsmith Press, 130 pp, $20

In his homage to W.B. Yeats, W. H. Auden asserts that “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.” That gets Yeats, Ireland, and poetry wrong. The clichéd notion that trauma happens and then poetry emerges is backward. Poetry specializes in painfully expanding the limits of the heart. Before Yeats, Ireland’s national identity was conceived solely within the narrow terms of Catholicism. Yeats’s poems expanded readers’ possibilities by opening up new paths of perception. Yeats clearly saw the whole enchilada, past and future, as if he had eyes in the back of his head. That’s part of what poems can teach — how to look in every direction at once.

Following in Yeats’s footsteps, Thomas O’Grady’s new collection, Coming Ashore: New & Selected Poems, reflects this plangent poetic vision. The book aims to shake up settled awareness as a means to widen consciousness. Take, for example, the opening page epigram: it is by poet Thomas Transtrӧmer and in its original Swedish. Right off the bat, we are detoured to the endnotes to search for the English translation, and it embodies Yeats’s lyrical double vision:

 

I don’t know which way

to turn my head—

with my visual field divided

like a horse.

 

 

A quick Google search reveals that horses possess eyes capable of independently rotating 360 degrees; a separated range of vision that allows for one eye to watch its rear hooves galloping while the other is fixed straight ahead. And you could say that O’Grady’s poems have the eyes of a horse — channeling history and mythology through the contemporary lens of poetry’s eternal present.

Coming Ashore, in fact, feels like a time machine, moving rapidly through temporal space. The volume opens with the section “Nuages, New Poems” and progresses to the middle portion, gathering poems from O’Grady’s second book, 2019’s Delivering the News, and concludes with offerings from his debut, What Really Matters, published twenty-five years ago. These chronological shifts resonate throughout, subject matter and word choices echoing each other across the pages’ timeline, encouraging us to read as if we had eyes like a horse. Nothing represents this strategy better than David Blackwood’s copper etching “Coming Ashore,” which supplies this volume’s title and cover image. Blackwood depicts five men in a rowboat, described by O’Grady in his eponymous “Coming Ashore:”

 

We age, and like the rower

in that sea-bobbed dory, his oars

 

locked in, his broad back arced

like a snail or a bow strung taut

 

against the task at hand, we chance

an over-the-shoulder glance

 

at making land that lies ahead;

then turn and face the stern again

 

where, strain as we might, stroke

after leaden dripping stroke, our former

 

and forever selves sit tight, their grip

on the gunwales like anchors snagged

 

in the ripping wake of the past.

How that lad in the prow ignores

 

the darkening deep–so young,

so sure, so ready to leap ashore.

 

Here time is the river and the poem is the boat. Passengers look in different directions, the older ones hesitant to move forward and face time’s tide, which will eventually bring death, while the impatient boy is eager to ride the waves into a future of anticipated excitement. Both sensibilities exist in the same image — changes in what perception “sees” will, in turn, shift the coordinates of reality.

Steeped in natural landscapes, rivers and shores, as well as music and painting, Coming Ashore proffers what O’Grady labels “the Irish spirit.” Born on Prince Edward Island, the writer grew up part of the Irish diaspora. Seasoning his lines with Gaeilge (the Gaelic dialect particular to Ireland), O’Grady frequently leans on his Celtic heritage, which makes sense, given that he was Director of Irish Studies at UMass-Boston for thirty-five years. Allusions to James Joyce, Seamus Heaney, and Brendan Behan are marbled throughout. For example, O’Grady’s poem “Uaigneas” (“Summer followed in huffing / steam engine puffs of dust”) is reminiscent of a similar piece by Behan. An elegy in itself, uaigneas means “loneliness.” Sharing Behan’s sense of the word’s tragic grandeur, O’Grady deploys it, as the poet/dramatist did, to capture (among other psychological states) the yearning a train evokes in a lost soul left behind.

Looking for ways, like Heaney, to connect with political ideas, O’Grady’s “Weight of the World” draws on war photography to express solidarity for Ukraine. The poem “Nuages” (French for “clouds”) is the poet’s attempt to “[nod] toward a signature tune by manouche guitarist Django Reinhardt…that became an unofficial national anthem of the French Resistance during World War II.” The poem is a meditation on art and resistance suggesting that you do what you can:

 

The uneasiness of words

in these throughother times

 

on full display—page

upon unseemly scribbled

 

page … while a second cup

 

of coffee perks and Django

and the Hot Club play.

 

Playfully composing a poem entirely made up of the titles of jazz standards, “The Real Book” finds O’Grady reveling in his homage to “desert island discs:” “How Insensitive,” “Round Midnight,” “Out of Nowhere,” and “Groovin’ High,” among others. Dizzy Gillespie, Monk, and Paganini make cameos. In “6×6,” O’Grady composes short lyrics for guitarists Charlie Christian, Les Paul, Barney Kessel, Grant Green, Wes Montgomery, and, of course, Django Reinhardt: “how he played / with fire—into trembling curls like wisps of white smoke.”

“Nuages: New Poems” contains Coming Ashore‘s most powerful poetry. Stylistically, O’Grady’s earlier work can, at times, meander; his long discursive lines occasionally lose momentum. The poet’s more recent work is more intense, favoring economical grace. His tightly arranged words fall into concise, crisp, and powerful rows. Still, there are worthy antecedents to this approach, such as “Alchemy” from Delivering the News:

 

We walk the lane. Life brightens.

Flooding light weaves braided gold

from a field of sodden grain.

 

As O’Grady has improved over time, he has found compelling ways to imbue almost anything with relevance, such as in his lyric “The Visitor.” Perhaps inspired by Joyce’s symbolic transformation of a girl into a seabird (in Portrait of the Artist), O’Grady transforms an egret into an uplifting, twofold emblem of truth. As he has done before, he celebrates poetry as a dual revelation. We are asked to take comfort that beauty exists alongside ambiguity, content with the fact that history (Joyce’s nightmare from which we are trying to wake) is carrying us, like the passengers in Blackwell’s etching — to an uncertain future:

 

in the midst of it all, these hard dark

days, we saw from the kitchen window,

first by the drystone wall in the yard,

then ankle-deep in the pond, an egret

standing tall and bright as a wand.

It glowed, a blinding shaft of light.

When it rose into an awkwardly graceful flight,

it took us with it, above the suddenly

budding trees, and beyond.

 

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Michael Londra’s poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared or soon will in Restless Messengers, Asian Review of Books, The Fortnightly Review, The Blue Mountain Review, and DarkWinter Literary Magazine, among others. He contributed six essays and the introduction to New Studies in Delmore Schwartz, coming next year from MadHat Press; and is also the author of forthcoming Delmore&Lou: A Novel of Delmore Schwartz and Lou Reed. He lives in Manhattan.