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. In a style of luminous simplicity 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 uxoricide, and portrait poems of greedy politicians.