ONCE in a while there appears a first collection of poems by a little known writer which has an assured voice with something to say, expressed in a confident and successful form. To speak of potential, then, would be to do a disservice to the author.
A Furious Place, by Kerry Hardic (Gallery Press, £11.95/£5.95), is such a volume - rare enough nowadays, despite the adman's sales pitch about a second Irish renaissance is poetry. Ms Hardie's debut restores one's faith in the muse. The flame passed on by Kavanagh and Clarke still burns, and Ms Hardie has walked through the Holy Door.
Not that she is a youngster. She was born in 1951 in Singapore and grew up in Co. Down, but now lives in Kilkenny with her husband, the novelist Sean Hardie. She won the Works' Women's National Poetry Prize and was a prize winner in the Observer Arvon, Cardiff International and Peterloo poetry competitions. So she is not unknown; but the present collection will gain her a deserved wider audience.
The first poem, "We Change the Map", delineates much of her territory, which is mainly personal, local and domestic. There is lyricism, but it is restrained, and there is no obtrusive striving for effect. Underlying the lyrical observation is an awareness of transience, vulnerability and loss. The best verses express stoicism in the face of adversity, and a subtle recognition of mortality.
The author carefully examines landscape and houses - the otherness of things. Her locale is particular, but her eye can see how a wider scenario sometimes intrudes into such privacy, as in "The Localness of Weather", where a freak wind bundles up a Saharan dust sheet and shakes out the red dust on to the piece of sky that is her roof:
Some Ancient of Days providing swallows for sky, spattered red stains for chairs, sills, white petals of tulips.
Contradicting the particularness our landscape.
Marking small earth with great earth's blood."
The sensitivity to suffering apparent in some of these poems no doubt was heightened by the author's long battle with an illness. This subject is treated in a restrained manner, as a given reality. In the penultimate poem she meditates on a visit to an old cathedral and its graveyard. Examining a stone cross on a plinth where the Virgin stands, the author notes the tributes left behind by visitors:
The keys and the beads and inhalers, the opened lipsticks, their pressed juice coloured flesh all chalked in the rain. And I think what a furious place is the heart: so raw, so pure and so shameless.
Ms Hardie has mapped out well the contours of her heart.
Many of the verses in Knute Skinner's selected volume, The Cold Irish Earth (Salmon, £6.99), also give a local habitation a name; in his case, the area around Killaspuglonane in Co Clare, where he has had a second home for 32 years. Mr Skinner is an American born academic who taught at Western Washington University and was editor of the Bellingham Review. These verses are chosen from nine earlier collections.
This reviewer has a difficulty with some of his work, which is written in that conversational, informal and sometimes self consciously laid back style so popular with many American writers who were influenced by such poets as William Carlos Williams and the Beats.
Undoubtedly, the author has a love of Clare and the pace of life in rural Ireland. Gradually he builds up a picture of the place, with obvious affection. In the attempt to transmute daily experience on a farm, he echoes W.C. Williams at times: the watertank in the yard serves as the Red Wheelbarrow. The problem is that Williams chose his words, line breaks and rhythm more aptly and to greater effect.
As the volume progresses, the work improves. The second section, "Further Afield", contains more successful poems. In the final section, "Fictions", Mr Skinner uses the devices of personal narrative with some dialogue, and miniature plot scenes to capture momentary epiphanies. Something is realised.
Word of Mouth (Blackstaff Press, £6.99 in UK), billed by its publisher as the "first ever collection of women poets from Northern Ireland", is an anthology of work by 12 writers who meet in the Linen Hall Library in Belfast and elsewhere throughout the North to discuss and analyse their writing as a collective - though they are at pains to stress the individuality of the poems. My first reaction was "Another anthology - and another Northern anthology!" But this is an anthology with a difference. It does not lay any claim to being a definitive canon. Moreover, the poems are of a high standard, although some of the names may be unfamiliar.
Given the debate a few years ago about the paucity of representation of women writers in anthologies which attempted to be definitive (vide the Field Day anthology), there is a growing awareness of the need to redress an imbalance. So this anthology should do well. It deserves to, given the quality of the work.
Many of the contributors have published in established magazines, though very few have had full collections printed, yet. Joan Newmann, Ruth Carr, Ann McKay, Elaine Gaston and Eilish Martin are probably the best known contributors. I was impressed by the general standard here and discovered new, interesting voices in Margaret Curran and Mary Twomey.