Though the originality and durability of Beckett's novels and plays assure his reputation as a major writer of our time, his work as poet has attracted far less sympathetic attention. All the while expanding that "gallery of moribunds" he has made so authentically his own, Beckett has been writing poems on the sly…. Distilled from the hardy irregularities of Joycean rhetoric, Beckett's voice in verse has the same haunting cadence, the same "dour questing," the same "dread nay" we recognize from his drama and prose. Like some "death-mask of unrivalled beauty," Beckett's poetry offers us a very unexpected detour into the formalities of lyrical structure.

Beckett's lyricism will come as no surprise to audiences accustomed to his skillful transformation of the prosaic into the poetic. Even in Waiting for Godot, where two tramps mark time in an almost empty eternity where all certainty is provisional, the playwright presents...