New poetry: Rapture’s Road; And Then the Hare; Landscape of the Body; All the Good Things You Deserve

“ ... each night/I play both sinner and priest –/assigning prayers, the dog-collar,/the dove, the blister of thorns. Yes,/I have been here before.” A Ministry opens Seán Hewitt’s Rapture’s Road (Cape, £12.99). Readers have been here before in Hewitt’s night-forest but this is Dublin and the stakes are even higher as present-day raptures are haunted by a murder from the past.

Trance-like ecstatic language, “I saw//one man lift from the crotch/ of another, tasting fire .../ Terrible angel, come to me – ” is counterpointed by the shockingly prosaic language used by the killers in We Didn’t Mean To Kill Mr Flynn. “We’d battered twenty steamers that summer ...” Thomas Wyatt’s poems are referenced directly in the poem Whoso List to Hunt but also indirectly in the overall hunting theme where terror is mingled with desire.

Metamorphosis is the escape, flagged throughout by Hewitt’s emblem moths fluttering, raising the question of mutability. Can we control it? “I have chosen one life, interred/ countless other selves.” (Pleated Inkcaps). Yet the best lines emerge from a sense of powerlessness, in the haunting observation of Evening, With Ghost Moths, “each moth a door/ spinning open/then shut. What apertures//are these? Into which hole/in the night are they vanishing?/Little spectres – each body//a fitful apparition undoing its sign/ on the dark ...”

Nature signals Hewitt’s ongoing grief, “my darting eyes –/waiting for you, father, to turn/your white side open, to show yourself –/” The finest poem is the shortest as Wyatt’s landscape mimes Hewitt’s fear of death, fear of ageing, reflecting back his deepest emotions in a haunting illustration of Eliot’s objective correlative: “By my age, the snows of my father’s/ life were already half-fallen./What is that sound? The white hart//leaping through its dark estate./ Frost on the eyes of the animals./ Frost in the mouths of the trees –” (Snows)

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Michelle O’Sullivan’s And Then the Hare (Gallery, €12.95) opens with a precise, tangible image. “It seems the first in weeks /– actual sunlight on the table, /a strip so wide you could/ warm your hands in it.” (Welcome Stranger). The reader can’t help but share in this “sudden glee that it’s/you who comes to mind:/’Welcome, stranger, to this place/ where Joy doth sit on every bough.’”

The “you” is William Blake and it is a fitting evocation for a collection concerned with both the heavens and the earth. Blake’s dualist spirit is a strong presence, “Venus changes from evening star to morning star/ and almost surpasses earth every 584 days./There is that realignment.//Of earth’s sister or evil twin.” (At the Surface). O’Sullivan’s hopeful, watchful eye is a source of “Joy” as she looks down in Not Everything Violent Is Irreversible, summoning another Blakean image, the heavens reflected in the earth, “Thinking her dead I knelt where flag met grass. /Her still face, one eye open that held a blue/ and white piece of sky, that small.” The creature blinked, “startled, took breath again” and here there is a sense of the poet taking breath again too. That opening bar of sunlight feels like O’Sullivan’s spring might also be the return of poetry after a period of drought.

The highly observant “glee” noting details like “A November blackbird” who “doesn’t relinquish her seat/ from an aeroplane’s wing.//Content to skywatch a while, her bead-stubborn eye pierces the tail end of a cloud racing” could be O’Sullivan describing her own lyrics, her deceivingly quiet poems, which can be as timeless and piercing as that November blackbird, “As if she came from a courtyard centuries back, the wet air, the soon-to-be lit dark;//little gypsy, little pirate:/O, to have that ear and eye.”

“You often wore black and dieted on Mondays, tap danced to pay the milk bill, the bread bill, /large bars of fruit and nut chocolate, red lemonade on Sundays” – We Learn on Small Feet is the first poem in Lani O’Hanlon’s Landscape of the Body (Dedalus, €12.50). Colour and significant objects are vital as rhythm to this child of performers, “we had glass animals on a coffee table;/a red deer, a blue monkey, a green horse ... Half-asleep in the auditorium/ I’d watch them onstage/all sequinned up. Far away. //Cloud readers. Stars.”

Desire and colour partner up in O’Hanlon’s poems, most notably in A Red Negligee in a White Vanity Case whose title brilliantly conjures up the injury in that luxury, “After you found it, after that murder of a row in the night,//we woke to a morning without her.” O’Hanlon uses bare effective props: “One part of me wanted to comfort you,/smooth your wrinkled shirt ... too long hair./ Another part of me wanted to shove, scream, thump. //’It’s all your fault.” In Duende, desire pours through sound and objects, “the clacking of her heels, hailstones on a tin roof” – one of three poems where O’Hanlon’s “fifteen-year-old self” experiences a sexual awakening.

In Wildsong this self is a haunting memory, “singing with the others” as O’Hanlon walks through the “old Church” nodding to her former self, “throat pulsing like a bird’s”. The “red and green snakes” on a map of Spain are a presentiment for a kiss from “a boy who works on the Waltzers. Back in the car/ Dad shouts ‘What were you thinking? Traipsing off with/a fairground Johnny?’” (Autoroute). Near Granada, a palm reading becomes a coda for the whole collection, O’Hanlon pinning her lived life to the map, “a gypsy/ takes my hand, reads future,/ tracing lines and routes away from/and back again to family.”

“I am sorry that you are in the upstairs bedroom of your town/ house where I am pretend-sleeping and chewing hard on the/ left side of my thick tongue.” begins Canto One of the title poem of Elaine Feeney’s All the Good Things You Deserve, (Harvill Secker, £12.99).

Intensely dramatic and demotic, Feeney powers through 25 cantos, using strikethroughs, repetitions, parentheses to effectively mirror traumatic memory circling back on itself, “Sorry I got up at all on that morning..” or the poignant, “I speak for weeks after with a lisp, foolish and shy in college tutorials, not myself at all ...” The speaker’s sexual assault has rendered her dumb like Philomena who was turned into a nightingale. Unlike Philomena’s nightingale, Feeney recovers her tongue, finds the skewering words to say what happened, “you sat on the edge of the single bed/X downstairs with MTV blaring/and your cock is hard in your left hand/ my eyes are wide open”.

The final Canto Begin Againagainagainagainagain, despite all its regret – and with a nod to Finnegans Wake – celebrates the salvaging power of writing in a bitter joke that bites with satisfaction, “how does that one go .../cheer up love/might never happen (again).” Plotted like a story, the title poem’s central relationship with time is reflected in the more contemplative poems that follow. In a beautifully observed moment by her native Corrib river, Feeney is reminded that “there is only this moment”. (Now, If Now Only, even). Sometimes the inherent sadness of time passing is unbearable: “There is only time left to listen. I hear the crack over & over when a horse/ breaks his leg/ & they shoot him in the middle of his blaze,/ I can’t describe pain – though I have felt it.” (We Have Only Time)