Bring Everything. By Peter Sirr. Gallery Press. 79pp, pbk £7.95: hbk £13.95.
Misery Hill. By David Wheatley. Gallery Press. 95 pp, pbk £7.95: hbk £13.95.
Travelling West. By Rita Kelly. Arlen House. 173 pp, pbk £12: hbk £20.
Might the new Dublin give rise to a new Dublin poetry? Peter Sirr and David Wheatley, in their recent collections, certainly consider the city as it is now, in its rapid change and growth. However, both poets also inject a note of caution into their treatment of what Wheatley calls "the Tiger himself". Sirr treats the city with a watchfulness that always resists falling for the lure of urban renewal, while Wheatley has an engaged yet nostalgic voice, elegising the past.
Peter Sirr's desire to know his city means that it features in almost all the poems in Bring Everything, and becomes a character in its own right. Yet Sirr's city is usually inscrutable. When it offers itself as a poetic image the city seems to be deliberately avoiding taking on substance. Early in the collection there is a yearning for making connections, for being able to touch something solid. In "The Hunt", "the whole place pulled its chair/ closer to the table/ muttering secrets to itself"; the secrets remain secrets. So in Bring Every- thing Sirr reacts to the unyielding city by cataloguing, tracking and observing, typified by birdwatching and photography, and by "walking", "wandering", "meandering" and "strolling". Part tourist, part resident, Sirr becomes a flaneur of the new economy, traversing a place in which street names seem to have lost their resonance and where the individual human stories of others are out of reach. Bring Everything ends with "From the Sunken Kingdom", a vision of the Atlantis for which "we have searched so long", symbolising the drifting insecurity haunting this collection. Even in this lost and found continent Sirr ominously suggests that we should count the stars, "try/to rope them in". There is, at least for Sirr, no answer to his own question, "Who, ever, is at home in a life?"
David Wheatley's Misery Hill has at its centre another Dublin flaneur, the 19thcentury poet James Clarence Mangan, whom Wheatley makes into a street-prowling predecessor. Mangan's Dublin haunts the rezoned, planning-obsessed present, insisting on calling the here and now to account through the ghost of Emmet and spectres of famine, fever and laudanum. Obliquely and directly Wheatley rages against "wrecker's ball" and "concrete blot". Wheatley's disillusion with our times sometimes leads him to idealise the past, but this can equally be the makings of the most effective social and political critique. "At Sam McAllister's Grave" runs obvious risks in being a poem about the Omagh bombing, but it succeeds touchingly in the way it recounts the pathos of individual outrage in the face of the event itself, while politically it pits the ideological convictions of 1798 against the paucity of thought which lead to Omagh. Misery Hill ends with a second version of its title poem, a wonderfully enjoyable Paul Muldoon-like fantasy journey which drifts into Dublin Bay past the Kish and then falls into a Dantean phantasmagoria which never forgets the dispossessed and the asylum-seeker. Look out also for oneline parodies of Longley, Mahon, Carson and Boland. In its ambition, vision and angry commitment, Misery Hill has a clever intensity which feeds off, yet rubs against the "Filthy Lucre" and the "Tiger" who make a "shambles", Wheatley says, of contemporary Dublin.
Rita Kelly has an altogether calmer voice, at her best when making the most of the anecdotal. She is disarmingly endearing and perceptive in recounting her own experiences and friendships. Though at times too close to naivety and over-simplification, she does have an ear for a finely tuned line and an eye for detail which usually saves her. "Cups" is typical of her ability to turn a story, this poem becoming an unexpected amalgam of the 1960s and the bra-making industry. Again and again Travelling West sees memories in the landscapes which pass by on car journeys, and this observational trope is typified by the scenes which accumulate in "The Glass Case", in which a butcher's counter is the spark for "disremembered presents" . Rita Kelly's poetry is gently teasing and humanely open.
Colin Graham is Lecturer in Irish Writing at Queen's University Belfast