The scrupulous, triptych-style division of Ciaran O'Driscoll's latest collection, The Old Women of Magione (Dedalus, £9.95/ £5.95), provides an apt framework for the volume's ecclesiastical and Italianate concerns. The first section, "A former Franciscan Visits Assisi", is an extended fourteen-part meditation on the poet's rejection of his vocation. Despite the poem's formal, station-like structure and the recognisable religious precedents for its technique of diagnostic self-scrutiny, the overall result is an excessive and frequently embarrassing introspection.
The poem is an effective miniature representation of the volume's wider evasions, visible principally in its failure to achieve a sustained tone. This is partly an outcome of its technique, a meditative movement which provides space for different, sometimes conflicting, emotions; but too often the poem's oscillations between sorrow, blame, and hectoring self-justification read uncomfortably like a talking cure: "Where, then, was the period /of de- briefing I badly needed?" Moreover, Catholicism, sexual guilt, and the fall from grace are by now intolerably jaded subjects whose claim to representative status grows ever weaker. O'Driscoll's poem lacks force on the levels of style or interpretation, without which the perplexities delineated here seem all too familiar.
Elsewhere, this over-reliance on denotation makes the poet's sensuous, literalist apprehension of la dolce vita read like an upmarket cookbook, as with "Basil", one of several jumbled prose-poems the volume could well have survived without: "we simply spread it on sliced tomatoes or imitating our first meal in Umbria used it to flavour scrambled eggs." One can imagine the concrete experimentalism of Ernst Jandl's Dingfest/Thingsure (trans. Michael Hamburger; Dedalus, £6.95) accommodating a scrambled egg with greater congruity. Michael Hamburger has translated the title poem of Jandl's recently published Dedalus edition as "Thingsure" and provided an introduction of passionate advocacy for this little-known Austrian poet. This selection of work is a fraction of Jandl's total output, and likely to be unfamiliar even to the few anglophone readers who might recall Jandl's performance poetry from the 1960s.
The pure sound poems which owed much to Russian experimental "Zaum" are necessarily omitted from this volume, with its vigilant attention to the boundaries between a poem's ostensible object and its own status as verbal Ding-an-Sich. The title poem's careful, non-interventionist, lower-case stance vis-a-vis its objects recalls Carlos Williams's experiments in the same mode: "on a chair/lies a hat./neither/knows anything/of the other./both/are/so thingsure," while "dingfest" 's idiomatic connotations of apprehension or arrest, impossible to render in translation, hints at political concerns. Jandl's severely restricted language avoids pure facility; rather, it indicates a kind of extreme discipline reminiscent of Samuel Beckett's "roundelay", while the poems often simply display an uncomplicated, pleasing symmetry.
The limits of Jandl's technique are obvious, however. One might admire the ethical necessity underpinning his radical rejection of language's suggestive powers, but the best poetry is still arguably of an inclusive kind. Dedalus must again be congratulated for this accessible bilingual introduction to a provocative writer.
Michael Coady's All Souls (Gallery Press, £13.95/£7.95), defies accurate classification. It comprises biographical prose, epigram, lyric verse and translations from the Irish, all executed with considerable generosity and vivacity. The lengthy title-poem describes a series of encounters with the souls of the dead during a drunken journey homewards in the poet's native Carrick. As a poem it is not always successful (its central litany in particular is over-long), but its best feature is a kind of rambunctious humour which also animates Coady's highly enjoyable translations, especially the ribald "Peadar na Peice".
Coady is "local" in the very best sense of the word: his work perceives history and tradition as no mere revisable narrative but as saturated with personal and familial investment, evinced by the volume's remarkable closing section, "The Use of Memory". This novella-length prose piece recounts Coady's attempt to trace a great-grandfather who emigrated to America following the harrowing death of his wife, leaving behind his only living child, the poet's grandfather.
Coady's meticulous attempt to open "windows on the quotidian past" is charged with feeling and vivid detail while skilfully avoiding sentiment or nostalgia, for as we are wisely reminded, "the purpose of genealogy should not be the neat assemblage of pedigree culminating smugly in the self, but its exact opposite: the extension of the personal beyond the self to encounter the intimate unknown of others in our blood".
Caitriona O'Reilly is a poet and critic