When an Irish poet of Egan's stature titles his book of essays "The Death of Metaphor" the knowing reader realizes an alarm has been sounded. Mr. Egan's collection of essays--written from the "poet's poet" point of view--is a deeply thought and intellectually challenging gathering of publicly spoken and privately revealing insights into the decline of metaphor as the cornerstone of a poet's vocation. Mr. Egan's essays, while all of academic interest, are strongly based in his first-hand observations of the dimished role the poet plays in contemporary culture. The poet as bard, as prophet, as seer and sayer of the unspeakable is largely being lost to a world that heeds only the poet of the well-turned phrase. Egan's essays, as also his poetry, reveal that within this singular Irish voice is the working of a spirit that wells knows the anguish and the triumph of language. Egan seeks to preserve both, the pain and the pleasure, that is more than a well-caught image, a quotable line. It is, in this reviewer's mind, a tribute to Egan's singular voice that no one sentence stands only on its own. Egan is not, in other words, a "catchy" rhimer. Rather these essays must be read in their entirety and reflected over in order to understand his revolutionary call for the poet to reclaim the hallmark of wisdom and genius that Aristotle saw the creation of metaphor to be. Egan as an essayist as well as a poet remains a revolutionary. These essays are not easy reading, but that is exactly why they must be read.