In this far-reaching collection Maurice Harmon extends the examination of modern Irish life that he began twenty years ago. the mischievous boy exposes the conditions of life in Ireland through various manifestations - in James Joyce, Thomas Kinsella, and William Carleton.

The transformed nature of Irish society is projected in the satirical 'A Vision of Ireland in the Twenty-first Century'. In a style of luminous simplicity Maurice Harmon gives us elegies, love poems and humorous asides, delicate evocations of love and loss, considerations of misunderstanding between fathers and sons, a discussion of the attraction between men and women against the stark background of wife-murder, and portrait poems of greedy politicians. Childhood innocence and zest for living are celebrated in the title poem that serves as a foil for the discoveries of pain, deceit, and uncertainty in later experience. In the concluding section, he considers human experience in Egypt, the Middle East, America and Japan.

Maurice Harmon, Emeritus Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at University College Dublin, is a distinguished critic, biographer, editor, literary historian, and poet. He has written studies of several Irish writers, including Seán O'Faoláin, Austin Clarke, and Thomas Kinsella and edited the ground-breaking anthology Irish Poetry After Yeats. His Selected Essays (2006) contains articles on William Carleton, Mary Lavin, John Montague, and contemporary Irish poetry. A study of Thomas Kinsella as poet and translator, Thomas Kinsella: Designing for the Exact Needs, was published in March 2008. His poetry collections include The Last Regatta (2000) and The Doll with Two Backs and Other Poems (2004). The title poem of The Mischievous Boy has been set to music by Derek Ball and is the subject of a stained glass window by Phyllis Burke.