Trained as a scientist and ultimately as a Doctor of Dental Surgery he writes, not from pedagogy, but from his own nature; a sense of wonder at and worship for, the assorted reflections of existence. It is here, in his seventh collection, A Shed for Wood, that he comes home again, to Ireland, with all his accounts of life in the new world. His poems are a travelogue of oddly varied subjects and points of view; faces and places where he engages and acclaims the diverting particulars of living. He does it with poignancy and with wit, with tenderness and a peculiar perspective, and with a proud and well-earned American-Irish breed of wisdom.