On The Town: Love Life is "a homage to the journey of enduring love - from its first feverish sweaty passion to its rich elder years".
This is how Justice Susan Denham described a collection of poems by Michael O'Siadhail, which is dedicated to his wife of 35 years, Bríd O'Siadhail.
"Michael and Bríd bring us through the ages of love, from recollections of love's early joys to the challenges of maturing love, and they dare us to look into the dark," she said.
"It's a hymn to Bríd," said the poet himself. There are four movements in Love Life, he explained. "The first is the erotic phase of falling in love; the second is promising and making a home together; the third is seasoning and the passage of time and allowing us to shape our lives; and the final section is "full and by", which is a sailing term that means allowing yourself to go a little with the wind in order to move more effectively. It's growing older together in mature love."
O'Siadhail "is very deeply influenced by jazz", said playwright Frank McGuinness, who was off to Stratford the next day for the opening of his new play, Speaking Like Magpies, which the Royal Shakespeare Company commissioned him to write. "I learn a lot about rhythm from what he writes, and also his imagery, which is strange and sexually charged and quite dark - but I like that."
Among those at the launch of Love Life in Dublin this week were Seamus Heaney and his wife, Marie, artists Louis le Brocquy and Anne Madden, poet Brendan Kennelly and artist Mick O'Dea RHA, whose painting of a female nude is on the cover of Love Life.
Other friends of Michael O'Siadhail present included the writer and commentator Tim Pat Coogan; the solicitor and writer Ronan Sheehan; the batik artist Bernadette Madden and Antoinette Murphy of Dublin's Peppercanister Gallery, which will be exhibiting the complete collection of The Táin lithographs by Louis le Brocquy from next week.
Love Life by Michael O'Siadhail is published by Bloodaxe Books