POETRY: Fiona Sampson, Self-Portrait in the Dark by Colette Bryce Picador Poetry, 46pp, £8.99 A Tour of Your Country by Eamonn Wall, Salmon Poetry, 60pp, £12
COLETTE BRYCE is a wry and intelligent poet, widely-respected in Britain as well as Ireland. Self-Portrait in the Dark continues her acutely-judged first-person exploration of states of - usually romantic - mind.
Occasionally, an old jauntiness shows through: in Car Wash, "what can we do/ but engage in a kiss/ in a world where to do so/ can still stop the traffic".
Generally, though, colours are "dark" here, the language that of regret. In Once, nothing remains but "to steer around the gone// words, the known// words, the beautiful outworn// words"; while Belfast after the Troubles is a city of ghosts. When I Land in Northern Ireland riffs on "What's your poison?/ A question in a bar" to evoke an era of smoke-filled rooms, "the seventies-yellowing/ walls of remembrance; everyone smokes and talks about the land,/ the talk about the land, our spoiled inheritance".
There is, throughout this very slim volume, a sense of "the clatter/ of shutters going down" (The Manager). The book's own ghost is its alternative title poem, The Harm. A sestina which beautifully synthesises personal damage, the political, a child's-eye view and mature reflection, it circles round a "ticking" lamppost which the child is sure is a bomb: "When it goes off, and you are sure/ it will be soon, [ . . .] harm// will blow from the mechanical heart". When she's nearly run over in her panic, this ticking becomes the "child's heart". Bryce inhabits the form with casual ease: as in the book's actual title poem, she resists staid effects of metrical regularity. The Harm shows us that she is a poet of real range and authority.
However, a gathering ambivalence about love's complexity colours this collection like "the blue plume" of cigarette smoke. The post-hoc mood makes it hard to remember she is still a young poet, not yet 40, in an era when many debutants are well into their 30s. Perhaps it's no coincidence that the beautifully-achieved A Spider borrows the lucidity of "a fine-blown wine glass".
The spider is "a small wheel/ of intricate suspension": and this gift for "seeing things", as the man has it - the mark of a true poet - never leaves Bryce, whether a car is "pushing its beam along" or pylons, pace Stephen Spender, become Hopes or "mechanical giraffes".
By contrast, Eamonn Wall's A Tour of Your Country, as its title suggests, looks resolutely outward, to a landscape built from the man-made and the remembered; compound, too, of the US, Ireland and - more unusually - Scandinavia. Palimpsests of imagery and resonance emerge.
When Wall, who seems to have a weakness for list-poems, invokes a multiple bestiary ("Array of hedgehogs/ Catch of fish"), in Of Multitude, to "Remember me", we hear not only Dido's lament and Shakespearean spells but Psalm 144.
Elsewhere - though it's not explained that she was a great Finnish modernist rather than a place - Stanzas from Mirkka Rekola seems to be set in "Wyoming" yet demonstrates how rural scenes could equally be North American, Irish or Finnish.
Country ways are existential, in the temperate north, at least, and "Darkness drums incessantly downward beyond dogma/ To tenderness". It's a synthesis made explicit in Hearing the Ambassador Speak, where the narrator imagines handing-out symbols of US culture to students in a Helsinki park.
Wall's unique achievement is to understand that landscape is culture. Among several poems in praise of Boise - "It would be cool/ to live in Boise" (Hammer Coffee Shop, Boise) - the book's final poem, Leaving Boise, though ostensibly describing a road-trip away from the city, stitches personal experience into the wider history of Irish emigration, "Not one of us/ willing or able to put America behind us".
Not only the US but Ireland is full of wonders and pleasures for this generous writer: "I cannot forget single excitements", as A Route to Dunbrody has it.
But Wall is also a poet capable of drawing the mind's eye onward, "through Shelmaliere West Bantry to Ballaghkeen", to insight: "Cistercians answered each urge to go by staying/ put, that insistence I often heard but did not heed".
Fiona Sampson is the editor of Poetry Review. Her latest collection is Common Prayer (2007)