Poetry: Poetry is more than a civilised way of articulating thoughts and feelings: it is a peculiar engagement with language in which language undergoes all kinds of subtle mutations from common usage.
The reason for this lies in usage itself, in the way we distrust the elegant potency of the salesman while being frustrated by the inadequacy of daily speech. Straight talking seems a sterling virtue but little that is human travels in absolutely straight lines. Poetry, with its mixture of song and speech is odd enough and precise enough to get us to see life in a new way, as weird and wonderful, in fact, as it actually is.
Make it new, said Ezra Pound. Making it new isn't necessarily the same as making it avant-garde. What is new to the reader is what is new to the writer, which suggests that the writer doesn't know what he or she is going to say before it is said. Language dances the poet into new territory, offers new steps in its own self-discovery.
Dermot Bolger was a poet before he was a novelist, and is probably better known now as the latter.
Though his poetry is not much like Enda Wyley's, he and Wyley have in common a grasp of the sheer craft of verse, humane intelligence and warmth.
Bolger's craft is more formal than Wyley's and can lend his poems the kind of necessarily arbitrary rigour that rhyme offers. In 'The Baily Lighthouse' the 7-7 symmetrical sonnet structure opens out on a self-portrait in a flash of revolving light as the poet works:
"Absorbed in some novel with my back to the window,
Alone with phantoms who keep haunting my brain,
Protected by sea birds and seals on the rocks below".
Sometimes it is formality, other times it is Bolger's spareness that convinces.
Wyley's best work is intimate and celebratory, and though she makes less frequent use of overt formal devices, it is perhaps the very first poem in the book, 'Dish of a Moon', that offers the most surprising revelation. What begins as a poem about memory and moonlight shifts gorgeously to two foxes
" . . . who have found their way
into the garden through the wood of time. Their eyes say:
The moon is a light left on - its light there to make you remember".
In other places she celebrates love and poetry itself with tenderness and grace. As with Bolger, poem after poem articulates a feeling that is entirely attractive. The last poem, about death, opens, like the first on the power of transformation:
"Then from the cupped hands of that moment,
Gulls, like a spray of white spirit crumbs,
Flung themselves out . . . "
It's very good. Why then do I want more from both these fine writers? Why do I want the vessel to be on the point of breaking? Maybe the vessel should be built so that it can create and withstand pressure. Maybe I want the poets to know less clearly what it is they feel or think. I want them to find out.
The Chosen Moment By Dermot Bolger, New Island, 28pp. €8.99
Poems For Breakfast By Enda Wyley, Dedalus, 63pp. €10
George Szirtes is a poet and translator. His forthcoming book of poems, Reel (Bloodaxe) is the Poetry Book Society Choice for Winter 2004