Poetry: With loss being one of the great and natural subjects of poetry, in first collections especially both poet and reader are often looking for forms and strategies by which it might be borne.
In the case of Belfast-born Leontia Flynn's début, the lost thing often seems to be time itself, the title conjuring a here-and-now from which looking back seems perhaps inevitable.
Given that the writer is not yet in her 30s, the Larne-Stranraer crossing, the passing of the millennium moment, approaching exams and even the passing of a family pet are all immediately recognisable incidents and provide an accessible element of autobiography. And Flynn, who often draws on painterly or cinematic modes of seeing, knows how to invest them with significance.
Set in a kind of Edward Hopper night town, 'Myth of Tea Boy', for instance, concerns a mysterious youngster who visits a coffee shop and whose cup "rests on the intersection/of four or five sideways glances from our busy spots round the floor".
Yet not all of the writing is equally assured or feels equally important, as if the advice of 'My Dream Mentor' ("don't write about anything you can point at") had caused her to neglect the unseen things in the closer shadows.
If poetry is, as 'Perl Poem' suggests, "a special effect", Flynn's work has much to recommend it. But it's in less perfectly lit areas, such as that explored by the five separate pieces entitled 'Without Me', that Flynn's real promise seems most likely to be fulfilled.
Already well-known in Irish Studies circles, Peggy O'Brien has produced a collection of poems it is hard to think of as a début. That familiar enough wide-ranging American voice is here, responsive to the rhythms of thought as much as of speech. But it's the music, the sheer beauty of the cadences, that lends her work its richness and depth of feeling.
'Hospital Sonnets', the opening sequence addressed to her dying father, is a kind of grieving cello suite ("Your flesh in tears, your lips hung up to dry") in which "language is as far from you as hope".
In the poem 'Bullheads', in which father and daughter go fishing, the description of the sought-after fish is as muscular as anything from Ted Hughes ("snouting/ Evil at the bottom of the lake,/ Their dreaded leers and horns and bulging/ eyes, their cudgel skulls"). But the real emotional impact comes later, in the poem's quietest moment, as they row back to land, in their wake "The surface instantly repairing".
The second section, dominated by the sequence entitled 'Annaghmakerrig', explores the difficulties and dreads of artistic pursuit, and artistic freedom. In its portrait of not only the struggling poet, but also of the house itself, it is at last a really good poem about that most wonderful of artists' retreats.
The third and final section of the book returns to the subject of family, this time focusing on the poet's mother, and on mothers and motherhood in general, using the Biblical character of Ruth (O'Brien's mother's name) as support and counterpoint, and painting a world in which two generations can sit at a table "joined and separated/ by three feet of pine".
First or otherwise, very few collections of recent times have been this good. If this book does not win a hatful of awards, poetry is in real trouble.