Poetry: Each of these books makes a radical turn: from the concrete, mechanistic world-view evoked by their titles into those "doubts and uncertainties" so often constructed as the poetic.
But is this in any way an evasion of responsibility? Could it represent some failure of poetic nerve, or momentum, in the face of the real?
Gerard Fanning's Water and Power ends by reclaiming the beauty of the physical world. 'Canower Sound', the sequence which makes up the second part of this book, shows us the poet's mastery of the surprising in both language and image - "the shag and slime of stones", "a wind plays 'long fetch' to the waterline" - but it's a mastery which, as the poet's familiar advises him, "strike out in a languid freestyle". That ghost, Stonehouse the escape artist, urges both poet - and, by extension, reader - to "Make it up as you go along"; and Fanning's loose-limbed verse, with its understated rhyme and comfortable diction, might at first glance seem to do just that. But these quietly spoken poems are constructions of extreme delicacy, alert to the shifts of air and spirit. It is this delicacy which allows them to range an expansive geography while continuing their exploration of inwardness.
For, as poems such as 'The Cancer Bureau' and 'Wide of the Mark' make explicit, the deeper music of the book sounds a brush with mortality. In perhaps the most shocking and tender of these pieces, 'The Wards', Fanning evokes the fragility of the protection offered by intensive care: 'After the final blizzard I found her head/lying among the strings of the tent'. This register of courage and clarity helps return us to the opening poem of a remarkably cyclic book, in which the poet's final glance round a twilit cricket ground, after a metaphorical 'poor light stopped play', is 'one more entry' in a retrospect of life itself.
In Fahrenheit Says Nothing To Me, William Wall approaches these problems from the other side. What if experience carries a freight of too little rather than too much meaning? His title poem, one of a group of political pieces, gives us the poet struggling to read all that's incomprehensible in the world today. And throughout this volume reading, or paying attention, stand-in for attempted engagement with that world: "Reading in poor light/errors accumulate/I see things that have/only a tenuous presence/and closer to home/I miss the numinous" ('Postcards from the Inferno').
However, Wall is a poet in love with both language and the world which generates it: "On sullen summer days/light comes out of another world" ('The Coming of Fire to Ireland'); elsewhere, damselflies are "neon". In the end sense-making, like poem-building, requires tenacity, "the tentative pilotage of living with ourselves" ('The Old Venetian Lighthouse on Cephalonia'). If there's occasionally a slight foreshortening in the line of its lyric and metaphysical thought, in this substantial volume Wall, like Fanning, is nevertheless conscious of his responsibilities as poet at a time when (as he says in 'Prayer for Riding in Front'): "The omens are not good".
Fiona Sampson is the incoming editor of Poetry Review. Her next book, The Distance Between Us, will be published by Seren in June
Water and Power By Gerard Fanning Dedalus, 56pp, €10. Fahrenheit Says Nothing To Me By William Wall Dedalus, 86pp. €10