The task that this fourth collection from Mary O'Malley sets itself is to decide what type of road best offers poetry an asylum from a domestic combat zone that is frankly described in one of the most convincing poems here, `Anniversary'. Its tercets speculate, almost coolly, on the damage done by the "tight silences" and "hard screaming rows" between husband and wife that conjointly threaten to disrupt home and family, before closing on an afternoon's carefree lovemaking which takes both of the antagonists by surprise.
Marital troubles are a difficult territory to map with this degree of self-control, and the balance between past reckonings and present rapprochement is finely judged here, as it is too in the longer narrative, `A Question of Travel'. One means O'Malley uses to temper this confessional material is a conscious appropriation of existing poetic models. Ted Hughes's present of a fox cub to Sylvia Plath in Birthday Letters surfaces on three occasions; Paul Muldoon's "quoof" and Derek Mahon's "fire-king" also appear in what I took as satirical references to poetry's male establishment. The traditional role of woman as muse is attacked in poems explicitly about the painters Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo, implicitly about Hughes and Plath, and in several short polemics: a valid argument, but the cumulative effect is curiously disempowering, as it risks erasing the very identity O'Malley creates in writing this collection. One way of consolidating this identity is to appeal to mythology, and this produces some memorable images, such as the "four rough trade angels/ each wing joined to a hod-carrier's shoulder" who stand in for Matthew, Mark, Luke and John at her bedstead, or the sinister speirbhean who pulls the house asunder at night only to re-assemble it before dawn. Elsewhere O'Malley directs some stringent invective at modern Ireland - nicely dubbed "The Republic of Acronyms" - saving her most savage words for the influx of holiday-home owners to her native Connemara - "The Second Plantation of Connaught". O'Malley is most effective when she resists the urge to aggrandise the particular and allows the significance of her narratives simply to occur.
Selina Guinness is a lecturer in Irish writing at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology