Aidan Mathews' According to the Small Hours (Cape, £8 in UK) is that rare thing, a poetry collection that more than lives up to the expectations created by its dust-jacket blurb. It is also Mathews' first collection for fifteen years.
Although virtually every aspect of this poetry is powerful, a muscular line comprises its basic unit of sense, and the accommodating, unfailingly strong lines add up to substantial poems. There is enough quality poetry here to fill two volumes. The style is cumulative, its dense metaphoricity and exhaustive meditativeness broken by flashes of descriptive brilliance:
The exodus from her eye like a sleigh in the desert,
Or the slim, minimal shining of the line that it left there
As if this were enough, to travel a time in gravity-Canaan, Israel, Palestine, all holy lands
Where lovers go in and out of each other like kitchens,
Their mouthfuls of God, their beeswax bodies on fire!-
While the student nurses agree with their upside-down watches.
This is a pervasively religious poetry which manages to avoid all traces of religiosity, fusing its pained awareness of human fallibility with a sharply contemporary, satirical edge that is often shocking, as in "Surgeon at Seventy Five" or "A Third is the Life and Soul of the Ward". Despite his extensive use of Christian imagery, Mathews never comes close to the pitfalls of sanctimoniousness or preciosity. His relaxation into an insouciant, conversational style produces many memorable lines, as in his description of Milton's wife from "A Second Writes to Her Dead Son Daily": "She could not get him out of her head, you see. He had gone to ground there."
The book is marked by wider concerns with the fragility of personal identity, and with the unrelenting pressures of history and heredity. The sensibility at work here is intensely synthesising, repeatedly linking enormous concepts to minute observations: "the nineteenth century/ Lights on their hands and their hair but their eyes are in darkness" and "The universe forming from misty gases/ Like a Disprin dropped in a glass of water."
But to excerpt this work is to trivialise the effect of its exhilarating allusiveness, the force with which detail accrues to detail in the disclosure of a complex, mobile, quizzical, and painstaking temperament. Outstanding among many brilliant poems are "At The Nurses Station", "Total Immersion", "Caedmon", Working Through the Night" and "Wearings". According to the Small Hours is a volume which demands and richly repays attentive reading. It is a triumphant vindication of its author's talent.
Dermot Bolger's volume of new and selected work, Taking My Letters Back (New Island, £6.99), provides an extensive overview of his twenty-year output in verse. Bolger is a witness to Dublin working-class life and a keen and sympathetic observer of the difficulties of estate and high-rise existence: poverty, boredom, addiction. The sheer spitting anger of this work is admirable. However, strong feeling is no guarantee of good poetry, and too often these poems descend into adjective-laden histrionics where a calmer eye might better have served Bolger's intentions.
Bolger is drawn to atrocity. "Stardust Sequence" and "Blasphemy" are typical examples of the author's palpable outrage translating into verbal shock-tactics. Any reader of the latter poem (written in memory of Brendan Smyth) is likely to be repulsed enough by its subject-matter, not needing Bolger to ladle on the awfulness. Much of Bolger's work adopts a self-consciously public stance, but where it is most hectoring and rhetorical, as in "Stardust Sequence," it is least successful.
Unvarying line lengths and metre, the over-use of full rhyme, and verbal bagginess - "Yet no gates of gold beckoned/ Where Seraphim sang" - mean that Bolger fails to achieve for Dublin what Carol Ann Duffy or the gritty demotic of Tom Leonard have done for Scottish city life. And for all his anger Bolger is not above self-indulgent nostalgia, as in "Martha" or "Beech wood."
Ultimately, this is a poetry that lives in its detail. Poems such as "Bluebells for Grainne", "Ireland: 1967" and "Botanic Gardens Triptych" are enjoyable pieces of observation, and reveal an engaging, troubled affection for city and country. In its more controlled moments Taking My Letters Back makes a success of its defiantly humanist arguments.