To mark his 80th birthday Maurice Harmon presents a sample of poems written in the last two years together with selections from several recent collections. In these pages the range and variety of Harmon's work is evident. He has a distinctive voice, both serious and playful, combining love poems with political satire, elegies with family portraits; he also writes poems of surprising eroticism.

This collection of poetry sees Maurice Harmon re-examining one life's loose connections: departure to boarding school, family separations, an extra-marital affair, sexual pleasure and sexual abuse, misunderstandings between fathers and sons.

In this far-reaching collection Maurice Harmon extends the examination of modern Irish life that he began twenty years ago. The Mischievous Boy exposes the conditions of life in Ireland through various manifestations - in James Joyce, Thomas Kinsella, and William Carleton. In a style of luminous simplicity Harmon gives us elegies, love poems and humorous asides, delicate evocations of love and loss, considerations of misunderstanding between fathers and sons, a discussion of the attraction between men and women against the stark background of uxoricide, and portrait poems of greedy politicians.

For Alan Schneider, directing "Endgame," Samuel Beckett lays out the play's philosophy, then adds: "Don't mention any of this to your actors!"

He claimed he couldn't talk about his work, but Beckett proves remarkably forthcoming in these pages, which document the thirty-year working relationship between the playwright and his principal producer in the United States. The correspondence between Beckett and Schneider offers an unparalleled picture of the art and craft of theater in the hands of two masters. It is also an endlessly enlightening look into the playwright's ideas and methods, his remarks a virtual crib sheet for his brilliant, eccentric plays.

Alan Schneider premiered five of Beckett's plays in the United States, including "Waiting for Godot," "Krapp's Last Tape," and "Endgame," and directed a number of revivals. Preparing for each new production, the two wrote extensive letters--about intended tone, conception of characters, irony and verbal echoes, staging details for scenes, delivery of individual lines. From such details a remarkable sense of the playwright's vision emerges, as well as a feel for the director's task. Of "Godot," Beckett wrote to Schneider, "I feel my monster is in safe keeping." His confidence in the director, and Schneider's persistent probing for a surer understanding of each play, have produced a marvelous resource: a detailed map of Beckett's work in conception and in production.

The correspondence starts in December 1955, shortly after their first meeting, and continues to Schneider's accidental death in March 1984 (when crossing a street to mail a letter to Beckett). The 500 letters capture the world of theater as well as thepersonalities of their authors. Maurice Harmon's thorough notes provide a helpful guide to people and events mentioned throughout.

This comprehensive study interprets Thomas Kinsella's extraordinary progress from lyric poems and meditations about fragility and impermanence to complex assessments of individual isolation and helplessness in the modern world. His work, which has been knitted to Dublin city, expresses his engagement with Irish life and culture in 'Nightwalker', "Poems from Centre City", "Personal Places", and "The Pen Shop". His involvement with Irish history, evident in his absorption with the past and his creative interpretation of the arrival and settling in of prehistoric people, is demonstrated in his extensive translations from Irish literature. He is also a universal poet who has explored Jungian archetypes in New Poems, psychological stress in the 'Wormwood' sequence, and the notion of meaninglessness in "Her Vertical Smile" and of living on the edge in "Marginal Economy".In his persistent search for understanding, he has examined the effects of evil whether expressed in man's proclivity for destruction, the direct concern of "Man of War", or the reality of death in the elegies for Sean O Riada, John F. Kennedy, and his own father. Deprived of a community of shared values and the reassurances of philosophy or religion, he has conducted a systematic investigation of the question of causality and responsibility in the human and divine spheres, whether articulated by artists like Gustav Mahler or Sean O Riada or thinkers like St Augustine, Eriugena or Aurelius, and has verified the role of the artist as measured and exact recorder. His poems dramatise issues through narrative, elegy, allegory, and myth and commemorate love, ceremony, natural beauty and creativity itself.