Within memories of colonial invasion and tribal breakdown, The Doll with Two Backs tells the story of failed friendship between a Native American girl and a visiting Irish academic. In a many-layered work echoing with literary and historical allusions the 'Prelude' sounds the motifs of myths of origin, religious beliefs and oral narrative, while the main movement, 'Broken Lights, Broken Lances', explores these issues in more detail. Failure, the recurrent trope, is sounded in images of tribal collapse, in the mixture of hope and elegy attending the relationship between teacher and student and in the failure of the imagination to absorb the deposits of myth and story. It is in keeping with this failure that the friendship ends. In the stillness that ensues the poet-teacher searches for understanding. An answer may be found in the work itself. A poem about the conjunction of dissimilar forces is a metaphor for the task of the imagination: to make sense of disorder, to bring harmony to the "broken lights" of tradition. Well-crafted, graceful lyrics in Part Two deal with persistence and failure, the cruelties and fears of childhood, the joys and disappointments of love, the strength of memory.

Maurice Harmon, a distinguished Irish academic and poet, has published studies of Austin Clarke and Thomas Kinsella. His Sean O Faolain. A Life appeared in 1994 and his edition No Author Better Served. The Correspondence between Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider in 1998. The Colloquy of the Old Men, his translation of Acallam na Senorach, the medieval compendium of stories and poems, appeared in 2001. The Last Regatta, a selection of poems written between 1988 and 2000 was released by Salmon in 2000. Of The Last Regatta Oliver Marshall, The Irish Times, wrote, "A life, and lifetime's learning, inform these poems. They change our perception of the way things are. And they enlarge our sense of the possibilities of poetry itself. A first-rate collection."

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