The Poems and Plays of Oliver St John Gogarty

Poems and Plays brings together the contents of Oliver St John Gogarty's fifteen volumes of poetry, including his Collected Poems. It also contains poems published individually in various journals and 232 hitherto unpublished poems; as well, there are his three Abbey plays - Blight, A Serious Thing and The Enchanted Trousers - published under the nom-de-plume Gideon Ouseley, together with Incurables and the incomplete Wavelengths. Much of Gogarty's poetry was classically inspired; his witty lyric poems have the elegant grace of Herrick or the terse eloquence of Marvell. His appreciative poems about his friends and his elegies for some of them are balanced by Martial-like satires; his enthusiastic enjoyment of beauty is matched by the encomiastic treatment of places, itself reinforced by a keen awareness of their historical and often dramatic associations. Now that his work is being made available again, readers have the opportunity to appreciate the lively evocative writings of this Renaissance man whose poetry W.B.Yeats so admired, including more of Gogarty's work in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935 than of any other living poet. His poetry conveys his infective love of beauty of all kinds, the fundamental seriousness beneath his witty persiflage, his moving awareness of Time's inexorable pressures, and his emphasis upon the need to face death with dignity.