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Richard Murphy. Collected Poems, 1952-2000 Winston-Salem, N.C. Wake Forest University Press. 2001. 216 pages. $28.95 ($18.95 paper). ISBN 0-916390-98-5 (97-7 paper)
THE POET RICHARD MURPHY first achieved prominence with the London and New York publication of Sailing to an Island in 1963. Like Thomas Kinsella and John Montague, he came to be regarded as an important figure in the revival of Irish writing in the 1950s and 1960s. His critical reputation has waned since then; while his work appears in anthologies of contemporary Irish poetry, it is not to be found in Norton's and Oxford's anthologies of twentieth-century "British" poetry (which do include Kinsella and Montague). Still, Murphy's poetry has much in it that is distinctive and worth knowing.
Murphy's first collection...