Ago: New & Selected Poems

"Thomas Dillon Redshaw is known as the past editor of Éire-Ireland, the founder of New Hibernia Review, and as a scholar of the poetry of John Montague and of the Dolmen Press. All this public industry on behalf of others has obscured the fact that he has been saving the best part of himself for his own poetry. This new selection from Salmon Poetry brings together poems reaching back to Frostian nature-poems redolent of the New England coast, a Vietnam War poem, ekphrastic poems, and splendidly vivid poems on a Midwest tornado and an ice storm. Midway, he digests the influences of Thomas Kinsella, Randall Jarrell, and John Montague, before towards the end one hears Redshaw’s own truest voice in the deeply moving elegies to his father. The clarity of those sorrowful late lyrics is a wonderful achievement, the fruit of fifty years as a practicing poet. Redshaw has spent so much time giving prizes to others, it’s about time someone blew his horn and trumpeted the simple truth: he’s a really good poet."

Adrian Frazier, author of John Behan: The Bull of Sherriff Street (2015)