When he works in a looser form -- with lines of uneven length and a free verse form -- the effect is less satisfying and the poems have an unfinished quality. He has a lively, buoyant personality, a fresh adventurous imagination and delights in verbal dexterity. His fine poetic intelligence is sometimes indebted to that able craftsman, Austin Clarke, particularly in the word-play. Some poems have the freshness of folk tales, the magic of myth and legend. The unexpected is a cause of delight. Monahan's poems take place in a sunlit imagination where the blacker side of life, although not absent, is not allowed to darken the material. They are delightful poems, entertaining, high-spirited, with their feet on the ground of the familiar even when they deal with the marvelous and the invisible.