Dear Life

O’ Driscoll’s conversational, trustworthy style, wry attention to contemporary life, and work on behalf of other poets, made him a widely beloved figure in Ireland before his death in 2012. This ninth book retains his affable, inviting virtues (reminiscent at times of Louis MacNeice) while focusing on topics that most conversations avoid: the untrustworthiness, or indeed the falsity, of organized Christian belief, and the imminence of death. “God gets nothing right these days,/ our ways no longer his ways,” O’Driscoll (Reality Check) decides, calling the deity “this mystifying no-show”; “Death is the very spit/ of life, its flip side,” he says elsewhere, adapting The Epic of Gilgamesh. A briskly rueful four-part poem contemplates the poet’s retirement from his (real) job at the Irish equivalent of the IRS; a witty meditation on hospitals, doctors, “Tests” imagines dying as a way to “fill my parents’ shoes,/ follow in a family tradition that/ goes back as far as can be traced.” O’Driscoll’s signature effects, sad and chatty at once, resemble nothing in American poetry, and might prove delightful—or alien—to U.S. ears; his association with Seamus Heaney (who contributes an introduction) might help his reception, though what will help most are the strongest lines here, near the end of the book, where O’ Driscoll tells himself not to “do down life,” to “recall how glorious it seemed,” with “just enough room on the thin-skinned/ page to set the record straight.” (Sept.)