"Planet Earth opens with the literal shattering of a blackboard. In the poems that follow, Patrick O'Neill shatters illusions of self and others in his usual no-holds-barred style. He rejects being called a legend ("Between a Canoe and a Dock") - legendary people are dead or might as well be dead - and the struggle to overcome the label revives his joy in reflection. The narrator of the poems is true to himself, however hard and lonely that can be. He's open to blinding insights that come unsolicited from encounters with friends, family, lovers, and strangers. In the best of these poems the...

In Nearly Naked, Patrick O'Neill strips away the pretense and posturing - the fear, really - that prevents people from preserving their integrity in a world that increasingly fails to value that bedrock trait: A college bureaucracy that favors a clean desk over an inquiring mind; a brotherhood threatened by feminists; people who fall short of other peoples' unrealistic expectations-O'Neill holds them all accountable in his poems, which read as short stories. There's a moral to each poem - and O'Neill is a skilled teller of entertaining tales. This book is full of favorite O'Neill...

Trilingual Joyce is a detailed comparative study of James Joyce's personal involvement in both French and Italian translations of his iconic 1928 text Anna Livia Plurabelle, which later became the eighth chapter of Finnegans Wake.