Poetry There is a moment in the final poem of Mary O'Malley's fine new collection, A Perfect V, when a hawk catches a plover in mid-air. The encounter is sudden and lethal and becomes the perfect metaphor for the act of writing:
Language can be like this.
A fine spray of blood
like a lacquer fan, then nothing.
The hawk's attack is certainly an apt metaphor for O'Malley's writing which throughout is vivid, feral, incisive and brutal in its pursuit of the true image.
The poems in A Perfect V are about victims and survivors. There is a pervasive sense of alienation and homelessness in the first poem, Silence, with its assertion that "there is nowhere to run except the edge". This sense is sustained through narratives of lost homes such as The Heart or The Miracle of the Cherry Tree, where the poet asks "Where is home now?" in the wake of children leaving the nest, or husbands simply leaving.
But these are not just empty-nester poems; O'Malley seems constantly in the process of recreating or remaking identities. In The Shannon Stopover the plight of the narrator, a hooded detainee en route to Guantanamo Bay, reminds us that we are all implicated in his fate: "Give me citizenship of this planet - /at least one witness to speak for me".
Concerns for language, how it is transmuted through history, lie at the heart of this collection. In Lynch, based on historical accounts of the hanging by a 15th-century mayor of Galway of his own son for murder, the poet notes how the surname may have mutated into the verb used for hanging negroes in the Deep South and comments: "Language has a diamond core . . . a word / can make its way in spite of history to such a crooked truth". O'Malley is adept at showing the multi-faceted nature of language; it seems a shame, therefore, that she has been let down by Carcanet, who missed three typographical errors.
In Lynch, O'Malley points out that there is no account given by Agnes, the woman at the centre of the case. Mary O'Donnell is equally concerned with the desire to rediscover women that history has ignored. Her latest volume, a collection of new and selected poems, contains many fine pieces that redress the balance. For example, the title poem of her 1998 collection, Unlegendary Heroes, responds to a folklore survey that only listed the achievements of the men of the parish by citing a whole series of women achievers: "Birdy McMahon, of Faulkland,/ walked to Monaghan for a sack of flour two days before/ her eighth child was born".
The Place of Miracles shows O'Donnell as particularly skilled at charting the fraught territory of family relationships. She pinions the nuances of mother-daughter relationships and writes movingly of her father's last illness in poems from her 2003 collection, September Elegies.
The title poem of the eponymous new collection is a lengthy exploration of the sometimes troubled relationship with her sister, Margaret Veronica, and is rich with hard-earned wisdom: "It takes a life to learn kith, kin, / to bend, amoebic,/ beyond the primordial taunt of family". Later, we are told:
In the end,
we give it all up - life, love, hate, the lot,
our disintegration unstudied, material,
as cell by cell, we tumble into wetness,
absorbed
and absolved.
Reading this selection, we get a chance to see the consistency and development of O'Donnell's imagery over the past two decades. It is quite an achievement.
Nessa O'Mahony is a poet and critic. Her latest collection, Trapping a Ghost, was published by bluechrome, Bristol, last year
A Perfect V By Mary O'Malley Carcanet, 78pp. £8.95 The Place of Miracles By Mary O'Donnell New Island, 186pp. €12.99