In this newly expanded edition of The Marriage of the Portuguese, first published in 1978, Sam Pereira encounters the world as it exists now, three decades later, and weaves poetry around his signature realization of sometimes painful, sometimes joyous experience. Often cynical and at times somewhat risque, this is the work of a man who has lived fully those three additional decades and survived them handily, having learned to accept life's uncertainties--indeed to embrace them--even as he recognizes that knowledge is at best fleeting.

In poems evocative of times past, The Marriage of the...