Poetry: Caitríona O'Reilly's second collection, The Sea Cabinet, comes with a stack of conventional honours.
In 2002, her first book was short-listed for the Forward Prize for best first collection and won the Rooney Prize; her second has a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. And yet this is a profoundly unconventional collection. It is not, to begin with, lyric verse. Rather, it is an exploration of disturbance and alienation; whose strikingly ornate, often historically-derived imagery generates a sense of coalescence, of the irresistible thickening-up of experience. In the title poem,
The twenty-ninth letter of the Arabic
alphabet
is nun, which means "a whale". "A fall,
a fall"
is what the Artic whalers called, meaning
"a whale". God rested the earth on an
angel's
shoulders, the angel on a rock, the rock
on a bull,
and the bull on the back of a whale.
This virtuoso elision of cultures nets the whole "fallen" world into O'Reilly's cosmogony: where myths are stacked on top of each other. In only six lines, she has drawn in enough symbolic resources to fuel several poetry collections.
The passage is characteristic. Elsewhere, Six Landscapes are peopled by observers, ghosts, the marks of human labour. Not for O'Reilly the attempt to empty oneself into observation. A persona is always in the foreground, raising both the stakes - a poem on the break-up of a relationship is called To the Muse; another title is But to the Girdle do the Gods Inherit - and the register. In Persona, a formally-satisfying pantoum which proceeds by full - or near - repetition of whole lines in a telling imitation of obsessional thought, "these unmoored pieces of the night/ breathe their black into my day". If this sounds like Plath, it's perhaps not surprising; since O'Reilly's poetic project, too, is the appropriation of rich context, including Irish and British history, to personal meaning-making.
Her language is haunted, too. No-one could call contemporary the idiom of a poem which opens, "Are we condemned to repeat, you and I,/the scenario of the railway-station tea room", with its echoes of Eliot's The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock ("Let us go then, you and I"), not to mention of the film Brief Encounter. This is not inadvertent - as that "condemned to repeat" cleverly asserts - but it does produce a slightly claustrophobic, indeed submarine, sensation in The Sea Cabinet's reader. This is a risk-taking, thickly-layered book. Occasionally, as in the embarrassingly-laboured In the Deaf Man's House, those risks do not pay off. But the several poems here which succeed triumphantly make this a volume worth investing in. When she stands back, letting the poem build a new myth around an object of quotidian apprehension - a Heliotrope, an X-ray - O'Reilly can be among the best we have.
Dolores Stewart and Colette Nic Aodha, both from the West of Ireland, are poets more widely published in Irish than English. Dolores Stewart's Presence of Mind exhibits a sensibility profoundly shaped by the Western canon. Spencer and Wittgenstein, Plato and Dante, Trakl, Max Beckman and Rembrandt, are among the book's real presences. Stewart is a poet without pretension, however. Her wider European culture is as fully-assimilated as the detailed idiom of local speech - in Off the Record - or a Connemara townland, in Wittgenstein in Connemara; a poem whose frank synthesis of thought with concrete experience has the Wittgenstein who "knew about the things that couldn't be said" as a local countryman, living alone with "the sight of colour slipping/ from the backbone of a mackerel sky".
Elsewhere, in language pared down to take its own weight, Antigone is "like a chickenbone/In the royal throat"; Ariadne is abandoned by Theseus with filmic accuracy. In a deftly-articulated reworking, in Double Take, Echo dreams of "an escape from the last//Pair of see-saw fricatives". Beautifully exact, these poems wear their undoubted intelligence lightly. This is a book of real substance, which deserves to be widely-read.
Colette Nic Aodha's Sundial is a more numinous, shifting affair. Reading it can be like opening a notebook; or chasing through a family album. Questions sprout in the margins: in the undoubtedly moving poem about a final illness, Our Time Together, what, exactly, is going on? Are the failed plantings, the Yew or the sunflowers of A Certain Petal Happiness, metaphorical as well as actual? Perhaps such questions don't always matter. At any rate, much ground is covered in this book, which mixes travel poems with scenes from childhood, the fear of terrorism and pastoral: a blend for our times.
• Fiona Sampson's latest collection is The Distance Between Us (Seren 2005). She is the editor of Poetry Review
The Sea Cabinet By Caitríona O'Reilly Bloodaxe Books, 61pp. £7.95; Presence of Mind By Dolores Stewart Dedalus, 56pp. €10; Sundial By Colette Nic Aodha Arlen House, 64pp. NPG