We first met the poet Micheal O’Siadhail at Gordon in 1997, at the college’s production of Dancing at Lughnasa—thanks to philosophy professor and expert whistler Grady Spires.

I have a program here that proves that date: Micheal is specially thanked herein.

I should say, “We met the excellent poet Micheal O’Siadhail,” though, forsooth, I didn’t know any of his poems then. We knew him first as a dialect coach pressed into service to help us pronounce the play properly. But (to quote the opening line):

When I cast my mind back toward that summer of 1997, different kinds of memories of Micheal offer themselves to me.

Brian Friel, the excellent playwright of that script was a great friend of Micheal’s—two admirers of the other’s art—and both lovers of the 2B pencil, as it happens. (Some of you may not know their work, yet, but you already share their loyalty to the soft lead-and-clay of the 2B.)

They were friends, Micheal and Brian Friel. I could say, “Of course, they were friends”—but that’s a bit pushy, a bit too easy.

Which Micheal’s poems exactly aren’t.

They’re not easy, as in facile. Not “easy” as Richard Wilbur uses the word in a poem to his young daughter who, while typing, “…pauses / as if to reject my thought and its easy figure.”

And Micheal’s poems are not easy formally, with their stalwart meters and jazzing rhythms and believable rhymes, though the poet’s skill with these elements orchestrates them, harmonizes them, and the language fall easily, pleasurably on the ear. Here is Ars est Kelare Artem — Micheal’s art is to hide the art, not easy at all to do.

His poems—what can I compare them to? Today what comes to mind is fine watches: I’ve been lately enjoying videos of these beautiful, intricate, reliable-and-useful engineering marvels, Rolexes, Patuk Phillipes, others, being restored—admiring their complex inter-relying parts, the jewels, all coordinating in a lovely portable shape that delivers the beauty of the exact time with our easy turn of a wrist.   

An easy figure, but that’s as close as I can come.

Hearing these marvels of his read aloud, as we first did in 2014 with his Collected Poems, or again in 2017 with One Crimson Thread, we will marvel at how the turns of line and phrase deliver the beauty of exactness to our ear and, yes—allow it—to our hearts. When Micheal reads to us, “A stillness greatens, in which / the whole house seems to be thinking” (Wilbur again). Twice before in Jenks 237, from front-row center to the second mezzanine, the stillness greatened, and greatened again, and the whole house seemed to be thinking.

Remarkable and rare is the experience—and the poet who gesceaps it. 

I don’t need to tell you he’s published 17 books of poetry and won many prestigious prizes for them.

You’ll know that soon enough after I welcome to your house this afternoon: the excellent Micheal O’Siadhail.