These taut lyric-narratives affect a wry, rueful tone only to draw the reader toward the brink of some considerable existential, even metaphysical gravitas-as when a strong current runs below a seemingly placid surface so the reader hardly knows, at first, that they are quietly being swept away.

Whether a couple at breakfast recollecting a first meeting, or a man confronting a life-quandary proposed by a half-eaten apple, or the poet himself considering the "thin hold" of a fallen limb on his garden's cypress tree, the lives captured so intensively in Skinner's poems never fail to glimpse and record the "fine print" of the soul.

Skinner was born in St.

Louis, Missouri, in 1929, but he has had a home in Ireland since 1963.

In America he received a PhD from Iowa University, and he has taught at Iowa and at Western Washington University.