Pitchcap and Pike, Colm Brennan, Dedalus, 71pp, £11.95/£6.99

November Wedding and Other Poems, by Ted McCarthy, Lilliput Press, 64pp, £6.99

Scar on the Stone: Contemporary Poetry from Bosnia, edited by Chris Agee Bloodaxe, 208pp, £8.95

In the Republic, we have become rather over-fond of pointing an accusing cultural finger at our Ulster brethren and remarking that their problem is that they live in the past. Those irritating little men in bowler hats, and so on.

We do not often remark upon the extent to which modern Southern Irish culture depends upon the interminable dragging of the past into line with the present and the sustaining, however unconsciously, of unhelpful myths. At the least provocation or none, the media trawl over the Easter Rising, the Civil War and the 1798 Rising with a delicious, almost moral, sense of celebrating the right thing. Even in the interests of bridge-building, would an Irish publisher issue poems commemorating, say, the victory of William of Orange at the Boyne?

Mayo-born Colm Brennan makes a sincere effort to interrogate the Wexford Rising of 1798; I was, however, put off by an introductory poem entitled "Ethnic Cleansing", which draws some odd parallels between events in modern Bosnia and 1798 Wexford. The nastiness of General Gerard Lake is neatly portrayed in "General Gerard Lake - To his Officers": "God grant us time / To chastise these dogs . . ." And one learns the sublimely horrific nature of the pitchcap. There is even mention of goings-on in Ulster at the same time.

There are interesting, naif drawings by Brennan accompanying the poems. This is, I believe, Brennan's first collection and he has an important ability to bring his characters to us fully fleshed out, rounded, against their backgrounds. As an item of 1798 commemorative literature, its value will fade as the bicentenary fades. As poetry, it is unsure. In a last poem, "Ten Years After", a '98 veteran reflects: "Forgive me child / Or friend if I / Don't perpetuate / The glory, and indeed / There was something / To feel glorious and proud of. All of / That, now clouded / Over by the loss, / The suffering, the pain, / The disappointments, the cries . . ."

Indeed.

Ted McCarthy's first collection, attractively designed by Lilliput, explores happier and less contentious ground, bringing us well-turned close-ups of a familiar, gently transformed world. His "Prologue" sets the tone: "Time to remake half-remembered things: / the road to work travelled years ago . . ." and off we go. "Restoration" is a keen-edged poem in which the child-poet, whose father has just sold a "showband cymbal" in his music shop, observes the greater universe beyond his own, and later, as a man, sees less delightful portents there: ". . . how the gods / are nothing if not projections of our hunger, / the cymbal useless metal until rung . . ." McCarthy comments wryly on what passes too often for Irish culture.

"Daddy Frank" is a serious poem about the effect that awful Irish C&W music, the worse for being a messed-up imitation of an import, has on the Irish (rural) psyche: ". . . even the liveliest tune bears some bad news . . ." As a first collection, it is not at all bad, and some of the poems are very good. When he loses a few cliched melancholies, he'll do nicely.

After 30 years of poetry wrenched from Northern Ireland's "Troubles", all those anthologies and "important" collections, one is understandably wary of an anthology of poetry from Bosnia. But this is not another well-timed "war" anthology. Arising from a trip Chris Agee made to Sarajevo in 1996, it spans almost 50 years and does a good job in presenting two dozen old and new Bosnian poets under the translating scalpel of poets such as Ted Hughes, Ruth Padel, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Harry Clifton, et al.

Muslim, Catholic and Orthodox writers are represented here and it's not all poetry: Rezak Hukanovic's extract from his novel, The Tenth Circle of Hell: A Memoir of Life in the Death Camps of Bosnia, stays with you: ". . . the guards had cut off the man's sexual organ and half of his behind . . . the poor man, after succumbing to torture, was taken to a garbage container, doused with gasoline, and burned." Not for the squeamish.

Book Service

To order this book and have it sent directly to your home or office, call THE IRISH TIMES BOOK SERVICE at 1850 30 60 60