Lovely Legs

In this lively and very readable collection; O'Brien has returned to many of her earlier themes, including dislocation - as she seeks to capture the precise moment of an event, its fulcrum. There are poems of heart and hearth and human relationships, familial, sexual, and historical; a father neglecting to teach his young daughter to swim, the trapped girls of The Chinese Chest, and poems of nature; often as closely concerned with the nature of man as the countryside they describe. Many of these poems, though serious in intent, are dealt with in a lighthearted and often witty manner, exploring a fascination with the ways of the world and its moral contradictions.