Kevin Higgins has a well-developed sense of the ridiculous. "I am not the walrus, but the sausage / you couldn't be bothered to eat in St Louis", he writes in the somewhat vaingloriously titled Poem in the Manner of the Late Kevin Higgins; and the new poems in Song of Songs 2.0: New & Selected Poems (Salmon, €14) are just as daftly grotesque. (Selfie begins, "My hair is the grass / on the local five-a-side pitch.")
Earlier self-portraits employ equally unlikely juxtapositions: Autobiography reckons, "I'm a cot / with a cloud of cigarette smoke / floating over it"; pastiching Pearse (and dated 2005), I am Ireland begins, "I am the love-child of Brian Keenan and John Waters". In The Lost Years, when he writes, "I was the future they'd all one day wake up to," the they are in for a nasty surprise.
Subtler effects occasionally appear. Them and You (after Dennis O'Driscoll) shifts from jokes to something more sensitive: "They brush things off. / You have to know why / you weren't invited." But broad satire is what defines Higgins.
Almost all of his poems are written downwind of politics, whose pretensions to making a difference, across the entire left to right spectrum, Higgins also finds ridiculous. In Days, "we were insurgents waiting / to be hanged at dawn; / as we watched / the flat be torn apart / by a Keith Moon cat." In The Eternal Peace Activist, the speaker "ask[s] Genghis Khan / where all the flowers had gone?" In My Militant Tendency, "Liverpool meant football; now / it's the Petrograd of the British Revolution."
In the absence of revolution, British or otherwise, Higgins enjoys himself at the expense of true believers, but the itch to say the unsayable can be hard to scratch, and the most recent poems are indiscriminately savage: an abecedary, or A-Z poem, Eat Yourself (after Rosanna Davison) begins "Accessorise yourself with genetically modified eyebrows" and ends "Yap yourself skinny / Zip yourself the f**k up." On the Departure from Office of Barack Obama, he writes: "you're the medicine / that tasted excellent / until we woke up almost dead." Readers might get the feeling that Kevin Higgins will say anything.
The complexity of David Wheatley's hugely various fifth collection, The President of Planet Earth (Carcanet, £12.99), is evident, in miniature, in its entertaining title poem. A 200-line monologue for the Russian futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov, it manages to gossip about "our local Mayakovsky, / less a 'cloud in trousers' than a rainshower" (is this a reference to Mayakovsky or an allusion to another figure entirely?), recount Khlebnikov's theories of language and the future (Wheatley-pedia-style), before skipping forward to survey the world of "tweets and podcasts too". Not dissimilar to Derek Mahon's biographical poems, but more discursive, this – and other work like it in the book – is fluent, smart, slightly arch, good company.
Wheatley writes very well in other modes too. Short, stepped lines of close observation make a different, rippling kind of music. White Nights gives "oystercatchers' / circling song / where // white dusk-dawns converging / fuse-vanish // vanish-fuse / converging dawn-dusks/ white". In Tides "a wagtail's tail measuring grain / by grain salt to judge from its St / Vitus dance seesawing over / the driveway". Precise images do not preclude thinky commentary: "pebble chattered to sand" is all of the poem titled Geology as Smalltalk.
Wheatley, a scholar and translator of Beckett's French work, is fascinated by how languages afford different opportunities for poems. Translations and versions from French, German, Irish, Yiddish, Spanish, Latin and the Berber language Tamazight (!) are often engaging. But bulking out an already big book, the point of all of their inclusion seems to be inclusiveness. Likewise the poems in Scots, whose knockabout satire (Wheatley moved to Aberdeen before the independence vote) is more predictable and less convincing: "Gordon Broon spoons up his Tory porridge, / Jim Murphy does his turn as Harry Lauder, / Alistair Darling's eyebrows dance the strathspey" (Sonnets to Robert Fergusson).
Much more original and powerful, and more than reason enough for readers to seek out the book, are Tunnels Through the Head, a sonnet sequence which somehow channels the desperate momentum of Beckett's prose, a similarly over-spilling poem called Dark Water ("Form of formlessness that is snow; / that covets your outline all down the street / and follows you in the door"), beautiful elegies for Dennis O'Driscoll and Sam Gardiner, and odd, unsettling, existential love poems like A Beehive and Self-portrait as Woman Reading a Letter and The Rumoured Existence of Elsewheres ("Here / was a one-track destination / leading only and / infinitely to itself").
Paul Muldoon's Lamentations (Gallery, €11.95 hb, €18.50, pb) is a substantial collection of translations and work written for performance. It includes another version of Caoin Art O Laoghaire, which Muldoon hammers into the strong rhyming stanzas he loves to devise. The phrasing is stagy – "steeds" and "fast friends" co-exist with "youngsters / who wouldn't lose it entirely" and "quilts / that'll bring you out in a sweat" alongside a garnish of French phrases, "hors de combat" and "tout de suite", but the lines roll by at breakneck and eventually heart-breaking speed, and it is fascinating to see how Muldoon, such a superb, painstaking elegist himself, draws out the sorrow of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill's great lament.
Muldoon ventriloquises two other historical figures here, Ben Gunn from Treasure Island, now granted a Fermanagh childhood and a dream of Hy Breasil, and another emigrant who dreams of home, Mary Mallon of Cookstown, better known as Typhoid Mary.
Their songs are a little lumpier and heavier on information than might be expected ("Isinglass is made of the swim bladder / of sturgeon or Atlantic cod", Mary tells us), but when images and story align, the writing is crystal, and far-reaching as ever. Mary's decades of isolation and quarantine are registered in a poem that is half (natural) history and half blues: "The lapwing causes a diversion / She trails one wing along the ground / The lapwing limps in the other direction / So her nest will not be found." (North Brother Blues)
The book's final section is a romp through Pillow Talk, whose rhymes make for a strange trip to unexpected destinations: "Though she insisted she was on lemonade / Medhbh had seemed a little tiddly / When she came back from the cattle raid / She'd christened Táin Bó Diddley."
John McAuliffe's fourth book is The Way In (Gallery, 2015). He teaches poetry at the University of Manchester's Centre for New Writing.
