For Prince Edward Island-born O’Grady, water is everywhere: in sailings and landings, in rivers, tides and shorelines. His poems are populated by fishermen, water birds, and hermit crabs. A cup of coffee sits “unstirred [like] the black pool of night,” while days spent apart from a loved one “yawn wide as a slough.” Water is life, death, and everything in-between in this “sea-hemmed place” where the sky weeps “buckets of grief, / not rain.”

Leonardo da Vinci said that “painting is poetry that is seen,” while “poetry is painting that is felt.” O’Grady fuses the two, creating vivid word pictures, making you feel their weight and fullness, each word and phrase anchored securely against the next.

This is only O’Grady’s third collection in more than two decades. His work is painstaking and intimate. It’s no surprise that it is published sparingly, though you would wish for more work offered more frequently. In any case, the wait is worth it.

Whether his subject is a simple shoreward glance while setting off on a voyage, the guitar playing of Django Reinhardt, or the sorrow and tedium of war, these poems do what the best poetry does: they tell us of the here and now while pointing to things farther and finer, beyond mere words and rhymes.

In the title poem, based on an etching by Newfoundland artist David Blackwood, a boat ride evokes an entire lifespan, encapsulating youth, old age and everything in-between, as our “forever selves sit tight … in the rippling wake of the past,” while an eager youngster in the prow “ignores / the darkening deep … so sure, so ready to leap ashore.”

In “Inferno,” he memorably traces the sun’s trajectory as “an orange globe of iron tonged … from the mouth / of a fiery forge” at break of day, to become “a horseshoe plunged in a blacksmith’s / oaken bucket” at dusk.

There are echoes of other poets, both recent and past. A nimble turn of phrase might remind you of Seamus Heaney or Philip Larkin, but O’Grady ultimately comes across as being more transportable—more universal—then those poets, whose work often feels inextricably bound up with their places of origin.

One line on, and John Donne might come to mind. So too Sylvia Plath, whose obsessive search for the perfect word is reflected here, though I would venture to say that O’Grady’s palette is even subtler and more refined, his search less strained, than hers.

This is an astonishing collection, the kind you hope for when you are handed a volume of poems, and one that offers more with each subsequent reading. These are words that bring you home. These are poems that, after voyages both near and far, come fully ashore.