In a year when the arts have been stormed by political forces, the literary arts remain strong and dry, writes Arrowsmith Press in announcing the publication this month of Thomas O'Grady's “Coming Ashore: New & Selected Poems.”

“A true poet” was how Mark Strand described O’Grady. About the poems in his first book, “What Really Matters,” 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 “Nuages,” O’Grady’s new work continues his exploration of place, memory, and the transient and transcendent wonder of the everyday. Meditating on mutability in hand 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.”

Professor O’Grady, who was for a long time a prolific contributor to the Boston Irish Reporter, was born and grew up on Prince Edward Island. After a long and rich teaching career at University of Massachusetts Boston, where he was Director of Irish Studies from 1984 to 2019, he relocated to northern Indiana where he is a Scholar-in-Residence at Saint Mary’s College. He now divides his time between and among the banks of the mighty St. Joe River in South Bend, a converted rumrunner’s bunkhouse in Adamsville, Rhode Island, and the south shore of his beloved PEI.

 Available at arrowsmithpress.com • Paperback • $20 • 137 pp. • 979-8-9915254-9-7