In Disguise

Drawn from several previous volumes, this collection of lyric poetry, comprised of rhymed poems and free verse, dates from the early 1970s and reveals the slow growth, out of a conventionally youthful romanticism, of a philosophical-cum-ideological approach to poetry which became characteristic of all John O'Loughlin's literary work in the 1980s, as though transitional to an uninhibitedly philosophical phase of writings to come which would leave even philosophical literature, including fiction, severely in the lurch.