Collected Poems of Thomas Macgreevy : An Annotated Edition

Thomas MacGeevy (1893-1967), translator, literary and art critic, and Director of the National Gallery of Ireland from 1950-1963, is less frequently remembered as a poet.

MacGeevy saw one volume of his poetry in print, a slim blue book entitled "Poems".

Published in 1934, this collection represented the work from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s, when MacGeevy was discovering his poetic voice.

By 1941, he wrote little verse and rarely adverted his earlier collection.

Thus it was not unil after his death that poets in Ireland began to discover his work.

MacGeevy was one of the few poets of the post-war period whose deeply felt Catholicism and sense of Irishness were combined with an awareness of being part of a greater European literary and artistic heritage.

This enabled him to forge native and continental resonances into a distinctly modern sensibility.

MacGeevy's verse was praised by many of the greatest writers of his day, including Richard Aldington, Samuel Beckett, Brian Coffey, Denis Delvin, Babette Deutschig, T.S.

Eliot, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens and W.B. Yeats. Susan Schreibman has produced this authoritative and critical edition of the poems of Thomas MacGeevy. She also explores the background of MacGeevy's verse in a critical introduction which sets his life, themes and techniques against a background of Irish history and European modernism.

Annotation at the end of the volume provides insight into MacGeevy's far-ranging allusions and literary echoes, making this volume a valuable guide to scholar and lover of poetry alike.