PoetryFergus Allen is a poet of profound measure and accomplishment. Famously, his first collection was published (by Faber, 13 years ago) when he was aged 71. Gas Light and Coke, his new book, reclaims not only a territory lost to us temporally, as its title suggests, but one whose mores and perspectives have also increasingly disappeared.
Thus, "Across the road young girls in cotton dresses/ Smile among themselves in the early sunshine,/ But they head south and I am walking north" ends First Thing, a poem of disappearing worlds in which "Admiralty charts/ Are true and beautiful, but bound as always/ By the Official Secrets Act and therefore/ Not to be trusted".
Like much of the book, this is an exploration of the existential confusion and loss of a life outgrown. There are more or less explicit elegies - A Bad Debt (1842), Death Sentences - but most of these architectural poems, written with absolute sureness of touch, layer scenes from a life which, if never banal (it encompasses Slovenian cave creatures, pearl divers, Mongolian prostitution, the discovery of bougainvillea in Brazil), is often strikingly metaphorical, with that "blackness" of which "there is never any shortage" (The Dartry Dye Works). In the title poem, for example, we end, like the masses in a medieval doom, under clouds "like a lid/ under which we citizens, rich or shabby,/ waited with disquiet, as in a stockyard". Elsewhere, gooseberries are "waiting to have their pulp sucked out of them" (After Pneumonia); in In the Hotel, removal men drop the body they've brought down in the service lift, revealing a face "like a haunting", "Emblematic of a man misled/ (As we all of us find ourselves misled)".
Allen has more to show us than simply mortality, though. He also uniquely illuminates what comes before it. In Untitled, "Light streams from the east like a solar wind"; in How the Mind Works, a word has a "silken cocoon" in which meaning is "a pale, motionless pupa, its eyes closed,/ wings never yet unfolded". This is beautiful writing; but it also has about it the savagery of the authentic. Allen does that rare thing: he adheres to the true north of poetry.
VONA GROARKE'S IS a fine-tuned diction, a poetry of poise and perfectly contrived effect. In Song, for example, "though/ it will be years/ before we meet/ I know now/ who stirs/ that blackbird/ into song". Nothing is clumsy here; nothing is under-achieved, nor is there any of that surplus of the unintended, in language or idea, which can be one of the surprises of poetry. The poem's dedicatee "stirs" - a verb with satisfyingly various levels of meaning - her highly symbolic blackbird into song.
Even this overt lyric has a narrative configuration; elsewhere in Juniper Street there are scenes from family life, wry observations of neighbours and of the life being lived in parks, boats and The British Museum Gift Shop. Groarke writes touchingly about her children, as in Why I Am Not a Nature Poet, a story of infection and cannibalism in the goldfish bowl. The poem's also very funny: Why I Am Not a Nature Poet "has to do with Max and Nemo/ scarcely out of a plastic bag three weeks ago". We don't need to know more than this opening couplet; we're already laughing, and Groarke's comic timing extends, elsewhere, to a fictional Acknowledgements in near-blank verse - "To my mentor, Victor Quigley (as always, Vic);/ to the staff and management of McAuley Meats [ . . .]" - and to her observations of kids in the gift-shop, "their backpacks crammed with treasures (paid for); their pockets with hand-picked booty (not)".
If comic timing is an instance of Groarke's poetic poise, so is her often exquisite turn of phrase: "Jane of the vanilla skin"; Call Waiting as "two round pips/ beads on a chain of intimate, dead air"; the title poem's squirrels "sifting with Victorian aplomb,/ tails aloft like pinkies off a cup". Indeed, Juniper Street is the book's undoubted masterpiece, its observations of a new life in suburban North America lifted out of the conventional by the poem's admission of internal life, when the poet experiences her husband's reassuring body heat "as something on the turn/ that would carry us over the tip of all that darkness/ and land us on the stoop of this whole new world".
MACDARA WOODS'S NEW volume, Artichoke Wine, is every bit as full of delights as its title suggests. Two of its sequences are musical. The Cello Suites - confusingly naming a poem for each of JS Bach's six suites for unaccompanied cello after a single movement - is a sustained reflection on forms of worship.
The closely interwoven tercets of In Ranelagh Gardens have that edge of rhetoric which makes them easy to imagine in performance: "No means beyond:/ and I'm falling/ as I told you." Elsewhere, there are affectionate evocations of Kavanagh in Umbria, Aughnagarron School and an elegiac Richard Riordan Leaving Glenaulin. These are deeply human pieces, as gently meditative on the matter of war-hatred as on the joys of belonging, which remind us "how we keep going back to where we are".
Fiona Sampson is the editor of Poetry Review. Her latest collection is The Distance Between Us (Seren, 2005)
Gas Light and Coke By Fergus Allen Dedalus, 83pp. €12 Juniper Street By Vona Groarke Gallery, 63pp. €11.95 Artichoke Wine By Macdara Woods Dedalus, 111pp. €12