Thirst by David Wheatley Gallery Press 77pp, £12.95/£6.95
The Bridal Suite by Matthew Sweeney Cape 64pp, £7 in UK
I am quoted on the back cover of David Wheatley's collection as thinking him "among the most scrupulous, as well as original, of younger poets". That was on the basis of a number of poems encountered in various publications, and there are other individual poems here that also warrant such praise - at his best, Mr Wheatley has an arresting talent.
The book as a book is more problematic. One doesn't expect a 27-year-old to produce a first volume as certain of its own voice as Seamus Heaney was at the same age in Death of a Naturalist - there, the reader was immediately and unmistakably in the presence of a major poet. Yet though such extraordinary tonal assurance in a young poet occurs only once or twice in an age, in Thirst you sometimes have the uneasy sensation of someone trying too hard - trying to find a voice that fits him, and also, perhaps, occasionally trying too eagerly to impress: letting us know he has read his Baudelaire and Mandelstam and Esenin and that other cultures and languages are second nature to him.
These are forgiveable irritants in a book that offers so many incidental pleasures. I would call Mr Wheatley a formalist if that didn't make his command of both the long and the short line and of different stanzaic forms sound a bit arch and stuffy. It's anything but - there is a keen eye for the vividly apposite detail, whether concerning people or landscape, and there is a wry humour that doesn't undercut the essential seriousness and real substance of the best of the poems.
These, for me, are "Sleepwalking", "Bray Head", "AM Radio", "Bedsits", "Litter", "Weekend Driving", "The Accident", "A Garden in September", "Best Man", "Lying in Late", "Visiting Hour", "Along a Cliff", "Duet in Grey", "A Spring Birthday", and "Autumn, the Nightwalk, the City, the River" - fifteen beautifully crafted and humanly engaging poems from a collection of forty. It's more than enough to be going on with.
No one could accuse Matthew Sweeney of lacking a recognisable voice, but it tends towards monotony. Again there is real skill here, but it's skill at the service of a somewhat self-conscious, sardonic quirkiness that begins to seem more samey and mannered the more one reads of it.
Startling visions are conjured up, involving (among many other things) horses that can ride cross the channel, the sexual allure of goats, and a penis found in a field, but after a while you feel Mr Sweeney has got himself locked into a prison of his own making and you long to escape its selfinduced suffocation and return to a world in which you can breathe more freely.
John Boland is an Irish Times columnist