Poetry: Jean O'Brien is a mistress of endings. Dangerous Dresses is full of poems which turn, then arrive gracefully at a point of neither under nor overstatement.
Hermes' Gift, about glimpsing a kingfisher, ends with a musical note perfectly punctuated by its line-breaks: "He thieves the air/ the peacock blue/ the orange light." Here "thieves", with its tail of dialect-usage, has a lovely thickness which conjures up the whicker of bird's wings; and this book has many such beautifully-achieved evocations of the country world in which "Lilacs shiver blue" (April Snow) and children blow dandelion-clocks, listen to shells, play in a family garden.
It's a landscape, though, full of human resonance. Still-born babies are buried in gardens, graveyards are visited and blessed, even the Christmas story is brightened (in Yahweh Rises) with unmistakeably Celtic imagery: "In Bethlehem/ flame brought/ in the beak of a wren/ brightens like gold". The quiet exactitude of this, here as in The Gates of Horn, reminds me of the contemporary English poet of colour and spirit, Pauline Stainer. And O'Brien certainly writes out of a landscape peopled by other poets. Radio Stories is an explicit homage to Medbh McGuckian, though I also hear in it an echo of Gillian Clarke's elegy for her father, the radio operator; while Picking Raspberries's "tinker woman" has something in common with the Achill Woman of Eavan Boland's Outside History.
A stronger presence than these poetic relationships, though, are familial ones. Mother is a Time Traveller, as is daughter, their identities confused, over-printed or stacked inside each other's like a "Russian doll". This is O'Brien's heartland, a territory she makes her own without sentiment or irony, in which moments from a domestic life expose their own significance. A mother's shadow is "large/and always ahead of me". A daughter is unimpressed by the space-race, "That's nothing, she said, turning a slow pirouette./ I can dance." This is effortless writing, graceful and exact as any pirouette in its insight.
The opening poem of Joseph Woods's Bearings suggests the heartland of his new book will be "the middle country [] alternative routes -/ Athy, Stradbally and Abbeyleix . . ." (Surveying the Midlands). But this is a poetry of transition rather than place; of "ignition and the shudder beyond" (Bearings) as an engine springs into life once more - rather than the dreamed-up authenticity of pastoral. Whether it's the engine of thought or a car taking "this trajectory trawl across the country" is almost beside the poet's point. Bearings are provisional markers to steer by, measures which change as we move; and several of the poems in this collection chart a heart adrift "in a room near the harbour/ longing for you over eight time-zones" (Plastic Butterflies).
For it's not only in country places happened upon by accident that "Evenings were low and immense -/ light leaving a vacancy in small towns". Something similar's happening in an internal narrative. "The bananas in the basket/ have developed age spots," (A Basket of Bananas); cleared for auction, a house comes "unhooked of its moorings". Ballyowen, the book's central sequence of 14 unrhymed sonnets, is an elegiac portrait of house and village. A partner's childhood home, still lived-in, "could shift/suddenly from sunlight ship to cathedral dark" (Dreaming of Cill Chais); but "old glass emits yellow" (L'Empire des Lumières) and these are liminal poems, their tone hovering between nostalgia and something much less whole-hearted - a fascination with decay, the voyeurism of the outsider? - in a "bat-busy dusk".
Distinctive as these tones are, Woods gives us variety - of diction, of colour - too. Bearings includes travel poems, set both in and beyond Ireland (including an Achill Miscellany), and comes to rest on a short series full of narrative suggestion.
A poet writing out of "the room with books, that old insulation", Woods can't help but evince his deep and extensive engagement with contemporary poetry. Wide-ranging but subtle effects suggest there's much held in reserve here; and more to come.
Fiona Sampson is editor of Poetry Review. Her next collection, The Distance Between Us, will be published this month by Seren
Dangerous Dresses By Jean O'Brien Bradshaw Books, 65pp. €12
Bearings. By Joseph Woods. Worple Press 63pp. €10