PERFECTLY ROUND RIPPLES

This volume offers poems, often with an Irish accent, that reflect on urban, literary, folkloric, and natural themes.

In his third collection, Flaherty uses several poetic forms, including free verse, traditional rhyme and meter, and haiku. While aware of life’s jaggedness, as in the title piece, the poet brings a compassionate eye to how people, nature, and animals suffer in this fallen world. Against darker images, he delights in pleasures like good company, drink, and his pet cat, who reminds him “it’s so good to be not dead.” Some of the collection’s most effective poems recall song lyrics in their rhyme, meter, and compression. Similarly, in “Let’s Ride This Cloud,” several lines use the same trochaic dimeter as a jump-rope rhyme (“Thunder warned me / I ignored it / lightning struck me / didn’t report it”), adding a musical beat and dynamic energy. A number of pieces comment on books, such as the New Testament (“Gleanings From Gospels”) and Moby-Dick (“The Godly Power of Vengeance”). These poems tend mainly to restate their original sources, adding a minor twist, such as “love thy neighbor, and let it go at that,” but provide little that’s new or thought-provoking. Although Flaherty is American, his ancestry is Irish, and several poems make use of Celtic folklore or transport readers to the pubs of Ireland, often with a free-roaming Beat flavor: “Set ’em up, bartender / … / if you didn’t know by now / Jesus hired a Leprechaun / to hide the path to Paradise.” Some pieces employ diction that was old-fashioned a century ago and clashes with contemporary language, as in “A Messenger by Happenstance,” where the snarky phrase “bodies visually challenged” (meaning, presumably, unattractive) occurs alongside ’tween, doth, wherefore, and lo.

A collection of poetry that’s engaging and sensitive.