Poetry: Sinéad Morrissey's third collection comes with a Poetry Book Society recommendation that, perhaps unlike certain of its recent endorsements, is richly deserved.
It also comes with a fashionably narrative and historiographic title which it effortlessly transcends. It is, in short, a book of splendours.
Some of this splendour comes from its subject matter: as well as the historical poems the cover blurb chooses to highlight, this is a collection stuffed with the booty of travel both actual (to China, over the Gobi Desert) and imagined (a Polar region inhabited by a lover after Brecht, the Macedonia of Alexander the Great).
It's far from self- congratulatory travelogue, though. Morrissey's is a travelling intelligence which acknowledges its own implication in a world riven with international affairs.
In Praise of Salt gives us the "cut and lash/ of voices pitched to shatter glass" as the poet shakes salt, that Biblical mineral of life, over her breakfast egg while listening to news from the war in Iraq.
If this sounds cosy, it isn't. Morrissey's egg quietly debunks the comfort of our Western liberal consensus. And this dangerous quietness works as intensifier throughout the book. The source of nocturnal worries is "Sometimes childlessness, stretching out into the ether/ like a plane". Apparently effortless understatement - there's nothing emotionally "splashy" about this image of a hurt which goes on "unto all generations" - is in fact perfectly controlled, down to the omission of the final full-stop, which keeps it limitless.
Elsewhere, Migraine inhabits the horror of the Moscow theatre siege with a doubled vividness: "a tangle of darkness like a Rorschach blot/ where his expression had been, opening inward . . .". Another persona poem, Stepfather, gives us New Zealand with odd echoes of Australian Les Murray's jaunty modernist astonishment.
With a risk-taking that's quiet but also vigorous, this is a poetics of curiosity, which looks outwards through the window which is also always a mirror. "Tack up a screen before dawn and ready the inks./ There is a country which does not exist and which must be shown" challenges the opening of China.
It has the intelligence of generosity: in portraits of old age; in the symbolically gap-lined Forgiveness; and in a stunning image of mother-love in the face of the unforgivable, which will "give of oneself because oneself, though puckered/ and sagged, has not yet been torn and has air in its silks still" (Icarus). Full of risks rendered invisible because fully achieved, this necessary book affords proof that a truer, more far-sighted poetics persists despite the professional horrors of "Viciousness" and "Gerrymander"ing (Advice).
Eva Bourke's The Latitude of Naples also travels through time and place. But instead of Morrissey's bravura engagement with the other, this collection gives us a northern hemisphere inhabited - one could almost say domesticated - by the narrator's experience. Bourke is a poet who belongs to more than one country; and her new book at times reads like a family album, with its letter to "my dearest daughter in the skies" (Breaths and Visions) and its reminiscences of Vietnam-era Boston, of trips to the Midi, to Mannin Bay and to contemporary New York.
Keep reading, though, and a deeper intimacy becomes apparent. It's the intimacy of the sickroom, in which a nursing nun is astonished by "a convention of shoes/ living their strange double lives/ wherever she looks" (Shoes); in which we long for the Sequel which will be possible if "Doctor P's prognosis will be optimistic"; in which it's only when the poet lays out her mother that "For the first time I did/ for her what without question/ she had often done for me".
This is the intimacy of elegy, a deeper grief which underscores the European experience; to which the lucid snapshots of Rozhinkes mit Mandlen bear witness: "The almond tree is the most beautiful tree./ I saw one once in a garden in Lodz./ I am six years old/ I like to sing/ and eat raisins and almonds."
Side by side with this, though, are poems that celebrate the imagined glamour of "the old silk road/ to Samarkand" (The Latitude of Naples); a world of spices; the pleasures of painting and writing. This is a mature and generously proportioned collection, in which Bourke the poet successfully translates the European experience for an anglophone readership.
Fiona Sampson is the editor of Poetry Review. Her latest book, The Distance Between Us, was published by Seren last month
The State of the Prisons By Sinéad Morrissey Carcanet, 60pp. £6.95; The Latitude of Naples By Eva Bourke Dedalus, 96pp. Hdbk, €16; pbk, €10