POETRY:BOTH OF THESE volumes make a slip-stitch in their authors' apparently seamless productivity, writes Fiona Sampson.
Theo Dorgan's What This Earth Cost Us republishes his first two collections, with minor changes: "I have taken the opportunity to excise some few poems, to tighten up others", as his Author's Note makes clear.
"In the main, however", 1990's The Ordinary House of Love and Rosa Mundi (1995) are reprinted entire. Dedalus's handsome new edition allows readers to revisit the early work of this influential figure.
Gerald Dawe's Points West, on the other hand, is a new collection - his seventh - but one remarkable for its economy at only 37 pages of actual poetry. We might be tempted to call this a half-volume, standing in the same relation to a full collection as novella does to novel. As with that genre, this is to imply no diminution in literary stature but simply a difference of form. For, in this beautifully-written book, a concern with the exact and to-hand - whether the record of a changing neighbourhood or a series of poems with an intimate, elegiac voice - suggests that such concentration is entirely elective; indeed necessary.
Dawe's diction is fine yet never finicking. In Family Tree, "I caught the sight of myself/ in what used to be/ Cleaver's shop-front window:/ a ghost haunts the place.// 'Milk boy', 'milk boy'". No swagger of muscularity here: but no fat either. Every necessary word tightens the line in place - and tightens our understanding, too.
In one of the structural riffs at which he is so good, dead bees become "dusty thistledown/ on the ledges and on the carpet/ and even on the books about the war// stacked in nonchalant rows". The image, in other words, leads to a description of a house which in turn reveals its inhabitants, for whom The Bay Tree is an elegy. Such symbolic opening-up of foreground is the characteristic Dawe gesture. Sometimes he uses it as metaphor, for example in the not-altogether-apolitical Shock and Awe, a description of lightning which starts by comparing it to "a bin lid clattering suddenly down the back lane".
Often, though, as in View of the Island, it produces a tracking shot which lifts the mind's eye "further and further/ to where I can only see,/ a glimpse of life". In this quiet elegy for a lost love, transcendent perspective arrives at "souls' awakening".
Dawe's subtlety and lyric control are the mark of a true poet; but it is this graceful and apparently effortless incorporation of the human struggle for that transcendence which is the real measure of his importance.
Re-reading Theo Dorgan's first two collections, one is struck by their coherence of tone. This is particularly noticeable in the poems of love - or, perhaps, desire. Compare the opening of Woman in Forest, a version of the Actaeon myth - "I imagine you rising from a dark pool/ late sun, early moon silvering your black hair" - with that of The Second Fortune: "Between what is and what is not/ we walked, the Huntress loosed a shot". The mythopoeic is never far away.
While this register imposes great responsibilities on the writer - the risk of archaism, the shadow of Yeats, the importance of controlling high stakes and making them work for the poem - it also offers freedoms, and many of the poems in Rosa Mundi, particularly, borrow an oddly-inclusive resonance from it.
No contemporary British writer could risk, as Dorgan does in A Charm on the Night of Your Birthday, "I light the sky above our bed for you/ with seven stars of gold, ploughing/ the deep for you -" though many might give their writing hand for the debunking wit with which he continues: "and that's not so hard/ when you are the sea".
Such fluency between registers, as between worlds, is one of the things we most want from poetry, and this book delivers it throughout.
Of course his volumes also differ. While the first is a young man's exploration of the world - from the classroom, with its "smell of wood and chalkdust/ baked in the sun with smell of the slaughterhouse" to Russia and the US - Dorgan's second declares a return to rural Ireland, from its prologue, spoken from a rural graveyard.
Volume, and book, end with Dorgan's extraordinary lament for his mother, Rosa Mundi: an attempt to "conjure now and forever her patient grace" which reminds us how high stakes for poetry remain.
Fiona Sampson's latest collection is Common Prayer. She is the editor of Poetry Review
What This Earth Cost Us By Theo Dorgan Dedalus, 168pp. €14 pb, €20 hb