THE silver coin of Cathal O Searcaigh's poetry has two sides and, now, in this exciting new collection, we area given our fullest view, to date, of the darker side. Na Buachailli Bana ("The White Boys") shows us aspects of the poet's personal anguish and loss, as well as the darker side of the community whose metallic talk O Searcaigh set out to hammer into poetry many years ago. "To give tongue to this silence which chokes me and suffocates me everyday" ("teangaidh a thabhairt don tost seo/ a thachtann me/a phluchann me achann la").
This duality - which mirrors the poet's own predicament is captured in the dedicatory poem to the Greek poet, Constantine Cavafy, who is commended for his celebration of the white boys of his imagination. But "i nDuibhlinn, i nDroim na Tineadh, i Maigh Ratha/i gCaoldroim, i gCollchaeim agus i mBaile an Atha", this Greek Love is but a subject for mockery and insult - a painful statement from the poet for whom the love of native place was very much in the naming.
After Cavafy, therefore, the first of the four sections of the book affirms the unapologetic personal. The tone is one of regret. These are not so much poems of desire as of memory: sunny days, blue eyes, a boat trip to Tory, are all remembered some 20 years later and conserved in verse: "didean faighte acu i ndan". But it is almost too much, too painful, this recollection of happiness in times of sorrow: "Stad! Ta an aois ina lui ar na rudai seo ar fad" - all these things are very old, as the Greek put it.
The second section of the book is rather pretentiously called "In the presence of the muse", although as the notes at the back point out, and as we have seen in the first section, this need not be O Searcaigh's own muse, but that of some other poet whose work is here adopted and/or adapted.
The dark side of the poet's rural community is starkly and masterfully portrayed in the long poem "Gort na gCnamh", which is quite properly given a section to itself. A young woman gives an accomplished and horrendous account of years of sexual abuse by her father, of her bearing his child and of its birth, strangulation and burial in the field of bones of the title. There is a beautiful contrast and communion between the woman's situation - she is articulate and moving without being overtly poetic - and that of the poet who must give voice to the silence which is her fate and her poem - dan, once more, being the key word.
The final section, "Scaradh" ("Separation"), again his poems of lost love, regret and death. The longish poem, "Cre na Cuimhne" ("The Clay of Memory"), celebrates the lonely life of an old bachelor neighbour and friend with tenderness and humour.
As with all Cathal O Searcaigh's collections, this book contains reworkings of older poems. These, show greater maturity, the Direain/O Riordain echoes of his youth are gone, and there are new insights and glosses which, along with O Searcaigh's reworkings of others poems, will give scholars a field day in years to come.
The imagery in Na Buachailli Bana is also more restrained, and perhaps all the more telling for that. The rich conceits - the strawberry hearts, the passionate lightning flashes or previous work - are less in evidence. Instead, there is a fine, well-balanced, conversational tone, with O Searcaigh using all the resources of his own idiom with care and acuity. Not even the music, which was often placed before all else, is allowed to take issue with the meaning.
The best poems in this collection are exceptional, and single Cathal O Searcaigh out, not so much as a maker of poems of which the Irish language has its fair share - but as one of our finest working poets. This is not meant as faint praise but as a statement of tact.
