“Straining Forward to Adventures Ahead“: Ruth Edgett reviews Coming Ashore by Thomas O’Grady,

Coming Ashore: New & Selected Poems  
by Thomas O’Grady
Arrwosmith Press (May 10, 2025)

If it happens that you wiled away your early years on a tiny, windswept island at the far eastern edge of the North American continent in a country called Canada, you will recognize the poetry of Thomas O’Grady as that of a fellow Prince Edward Islander. These images and sentiments are bred into us.

They’re in a poem like “Spuds” in which beach stones call to mind, “…new potatoes/ hard and cool, nuggets from deep/ in the red clay at home…” or “International Harvester McCormick No. 5 Hayrake,”  where “… that rig, unhitched and ditched” spurs a lament to abandoned machines and farmers’ dreams. Even “Delivering the News” bears familiar street names, as he tells us that “From door to door I bore the soggy news” but never came out to the good financially.

If this introduction makes you think Coming Ashore is a collection of inconsequential musings by an expatriate longing for home, think again. Mind you, that last about expat musings is true; but, in this, his third book, O’Grady goes much further (and farther) to make use of sights, sounds, and sentiments most of us overlook to illuminate the worlds contained both within them and beyond them. He takes us from the red clay shores of his native island to Morocco and Vienna, to his current home near Indiana’s Saint Joseph River, and up and down the musical scales with his favourite jazz musicians—then back home to fresh ground coffee and warm domesticity.

O’Grady writes of cows and crows and cowbirds, of rocks and cliffs and tides; of farms and fields and sun-drenched pastures. And “Spuds.” But he writes, too, of nostalgia and regret, and gratitude for the familiarity of his island home—which, decades after his leaving, he continues to think of as “home.” (It’s possible that PEI relatives and friends still ask him, even this long after he’s taken up a life and career elsewhere, “When are you coming home?” or, “Will you be home again this year?”)

O’Grady’s poetry is best enjoyed aloud, so as to catch the clever placement of sound and rhyme, and syllable. Written in couplet, sonnet, tercet, and prose, O’Grady’s short and deceptively simple verses show evidence of great care and strict discipline. Only in the reading aloud do we get the full effect of his use of assonance and consonance, his careful salting of rhyme and near-rhyme within the lines—and his near tongue-twisters. The rhythm of speech is not unlike that of your average Prince Edward Islander holding forth on a sight or a moment of note.

 “I like poems that shout out to each other across lines,” says O’Grady in an interview with Arrowsmith’s Scott Aumont. The sonic aspect of his poetry is “innate” to him, he says, and he speculates it has something to do with having been raised on Prince Edward Island, where many of the original settlers hailed from Ireland. “We don’t mind saying something that has some music to it.”

In a wide-ranging 2001 interview with Anne Compton published in Studies in Canadian Literature (Vol 26, No. 1), O’Grady spoke at length about his technique. He mentioned two of his favourite influences: Former American Poet Laureate Ted Kooser and the late Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, both of whom used metaphor and—for Heaney—“the music of what happens” to show how easily-overlooked occurrences can have greater meaning. It’s safe to say that everyone has come upon moments like these but passed them by without ever considering what’s beyond the surface. O’Grady is a poet who has taken on the task of calling our attention to them.

He also speaks of the “ulteriority” of his poetry, the way in which the stated subject matter serves as a platform for a deeper or less obvious meaning. In that sense his title poem, “Coming Ashore,” sets the theme of the book—or even mirrors his own life. It describes how callow youth sits in the prow of the boat straining forward to adventures ahead, while age (the rower) keeps its face to the rear, toward the distance covered and landmarks left behind. All the while, the rower’s contemporaries hold fast to the gunwales as they regard the looming future.

“I think I can say safely that every single poem I’ve written has a story behind it,” he tells Aumont in their online interview. And he has spoken of the feeling of awe as inspiration for his poems, “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast.”

Technique and inspiration aside, O’Grady keeps his poetry humble. “When I’m writing, I’m not worrying about whether this poem is going to work,” he told Anne Compton. “I’m taking pleasure in where the poem is going and how it is going there.”

He stays away from the modernist poets and leans toward the traditional; specifically, Irish poetic tradition. Nor does O’Grady pretend toward the mystic, despite what some might see as near-spiritual experiences in some of his verses. He’s confessed to limiting himself from grandiose ideas, citing that particularly Prince Edward Island way of keeping achievers from raising themselves above their station; against, in the words of Island historian David Weale, becoming “big-feeling.”

All the same, there is a grandeur to O’Grady’s poetry. It’s in the sun’s weaving “braided gold/ from a field of sodden grain;” in the image of Dizzy Gillespie’s “trumpet bell…a gleaming exotic bloom..” or the “dip,” “tip,” “slip and fall” of ice over a river’s winter cascade. Anyone who’s felt joy, or awe, or gratitude at the sights and sounds of the world around them knows these things are not ordinary—that in themselves, they lend our lives meaning.

Beloved Canadian novelist and short story writer Allistair MacLeod, who was widely acclaimed for his stories about generations of the mining and fishing families of Cape Breton Island, spoke of writing to illuminate “the great within the small.” In his short but meticulously crafted verses, O’Grady, the poet from Prince Edward Island, reveals the same.

A Prince Edward Islander by birth and upbringing, Ruth Edgett is a former print journalist and prize-winning short story writer with fiction and non-fiction published and forthcoming in books, magazines and journals based in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. She is the author of A Watch in the Night: The story of Pomquet Island’s last lightkeeping family (Nimbus, 2007), a narrative non-fiction book about her mother’s family. A novelist in waiting, Ruth is seeking a home for one manuscript and is writing a second. She holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Prince Edward Island and an MS in Communications Management from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication at Syracuse University. She makes her home at the foot of the ecologically significant Niagara Escarpment in the beautiful Dundas Valley of Ontario, Canada.

“What I love about reviewing books is how much I learn—not simply from what the authors have written, but from researching the techniques, influences and ideas that inform their writing. All of this makes me a better writer.”