POETRY: FirefliesBy Frank Ormsby Carcanet Press, 80pp. £9.95, The Thing IsBy Peter Sirr The Gallery Press, 80pp. €11.95pbk, €18.50 hbk

'PETER SIRR and Frank Ormsby have played notable parts, as poets and editors, in the cultural history of our island. These new volumes, centred in Dublin and Belfast, respectively, help us to orient ourselves in Ireland at the beginning of the 21st century. There are echoes of Louis MacNeice in the social awareness of both poets. But gone is MacNeice's " odi atque amo" towards the home places.

The Catullan renderings and evocations are one of the joys of The Thing Is:

to stand

under a strange sky with the customary offerings

to bend my silence to yours and know

the gentlest breath will never reach you

the fiercest word . . .

This is no translation. The Latin original is more springboard than source. But somehow in Sirrs poem the real Catullus is walking our way - in fact is already making himself at home:

tell him his wife was seen

out of her brain in the Morrison

The recklessness of some of Catullus’s poems seems a guarantee of the perfect tuning of others. Similarly, the versions of Catullus (and Brecht) in Sirr’s volume offset and add resonance to the more important poems grouped in the sequences “Shhh” and “The Overgrown Path”.

The "Shhh" poems are poems of globalisation, with titles such as The New Regime Inherits the Electrodesand For the Hanged Boys. These pieces help us to put names on some contemporary sources of confusion. An even finer achievement is the sequence entitled "The Overgrown Path", concerning the poet's expectant wife, childbirth, and the early childhood of their daughter:

. . . I look over and see, suddenly, how close you are,

what gravidmeans, how we are walking slowly out of our old lives . . .

In the title poem:

The thing is this: you hold them to the light

and laugh, you bring them to me

one in each fist like the edges of a cross . . .

A little girl plays with crayons under the shadow of a cross: the reader is touched by a quattrocentogust. Then:

. . . the joy of it lifts you to your feet

where you sway with possibility, conducting your colours

and the thing is this, the thing is always this.

That such a celebration of children and creativity occurs just as our birth-rate begins to top the European statistics is one of the ways in which Sirr, MacNeice-like, captures our current reality. Speaking as a Dubliner, I can testify that reading this labour of love I came both to know Dublin better and to like her better.

One of the strengths of Firefliesis the beauty of the rhythms in Frank Ormsby's best poems. Lines take off from the runway of ordinary scansion:

What should we make of fireflies, their quick flare

of promise and disappointment, their

throwaway style?

The same control is evident in the description of whooper swans:

. . . I imagine each dolorous yomp

as a bid for the true pitch, as though it defers

to a lough’s memory of winter or the last

death on an island . . .

Ormsby, like Sirr, is a mirror of his times. Here are the employees of a shirt factory doomed to closure:

the frame full of girls

arriving on foot

from the side streets

off Limestone Road

years before the first bomb

and its thousand echoes . . .

Ormsby’s collection has a number of key images – the recurrent fireflies, the moons on the North Circular Road, the whooper swans. What they signify is allowed to remain clouded.

Ormsby is tentative: a poet of the generation that endured the Troubles. In the present volume, the careful poems arising from sojourns in America seem almost poems of recuperation.

The situation in The Whooper Swan is a meeting in a pub with Michael Longley. The encounter with Longley engenders in the younger poet a sense of loss:

Though earthbound, landlocked, I never lacked till now

the gift of a coastal childhood, or missed a life

edged with Atlantic . . .

“A life/edged with Atlantic” – what Ormsby, “brushed by fireflies’ wings,” has yet to lay hold of – sounds very like the life that Peter Sirr, in his poems about his daughter, is already beginning to discover.

In mid-volume, Ormsby gives us what could be a manifesto for the mature poet:

I have turned to the ageing poets – the

marathon men,

the marathon women – the ones who breasted the tape

and simply ran on, establishing their own distance . . .

Ormsby and Sirr are not quite of the same generation and in any case at this stage of their careers are more like 10,000m runners than marathon men. But in their new collections they do begin to “establish their own distance”.

We expect to hear a lot more from them in the future.

Philip McDonagh, currently ambassador to Russia, has served in several diplomatic posts. His poetry has been published by the Dedalus Press and Ravi Dayal (New Delhi). A new collection, Saving the Balloons, is forthcoming