Exile—with its sense of suspended or impending motion, of change, loss, acceptance—gives James J. McAuley’s poems their need to be, their means of surviving the exigencies of the displaced spirit. Ancestors on both sides of his family were bards in Celtic Ireland. Although a naturalized United States citizen, McAuley has maintained his connections with his native land: the Irish times listed him among one hundred “significant Irish writers.” Although the poet writes of the familial and the domestic, he is writing at the same time of journeys out and back, of losses and recoveries. McAuley is as much at ease with the solemnity of elegy as with the invective of political satire or the sensual metaphysics of the love-poem.

At the center of James McAuley’s new collection—the work of over a decade since his previous book, Coming & Going, New & Selected—is the sequence, “God’s Pattern,” meditations on the Stations of the Cross, an old devotional form of pilgrimage or “pattern” still practiced in rural parishes of the poet’s native country, Ireland. Theme and treatment vary throughout the collection, from somber reflection on the fate of a drunk in a cheap hotel room, “Cantata for the Feast of St. Anonymous,” to the scathing Celtic-style satire, “The Gingriad.” McAuley is well regarded for his experiments with traditional forms and rhythms: examples included are blank-verse narratives and elegies, a Haiku sequence, sonnets, a variation on the topographical poetry of the seventeenth century, even a carmen figurata.

Meditations, With Distractions has the qualities that all good poetry should possess: depth, erudition, accessibility, a joy in the practice of language. Combine these qualities with McAuley’s humanity and humor, and the result is a collection that readers will come to enjoy and appreciate more and more with each successive reading.

Versification: A Short Introduction is written by one of Australia's most distinguished poets. The book discusses poetic meter, and may be the only source you need. McAuley devotes a short chapter to versification based on accent, syllable count, free verse and "classical" meters, but the book as a whole focuses on metrical verse and its constant reference back to stress in normal speech—it suceeds in showing meterical verse as a natural outgrowth of what we do naturally. This dispels quickly any sense of the esoteric—poetry is of and for people in general not for a special literati. After establishing meter in the normal sphere of speech, McAuley then discusses how abstract meterical patterns are actually applied and how variety is added to avoid a sing-song effect.