ANOTHER LIFE:I AM USED TO seeing weather before it arrives, billowing in from the sea on a long fetch of wind. The northerly gale snuck up behind us, lobbing little showers across the hill, writes Michael Viney
I was trying to behead the elder tree that hides too much of the ocean, but every few minutes, as it seemed, cold, fat raindrops were clattering round my ears. At each retreat with the bush-saw, tits and goldfinches scattered from their feeders near the door, wishing I would make up my mind - preferably, no doubt, to leave a favourite tree alone. The showers left the twigs hung with brilliants and a sky of two blues: clear cobalt above the travelling clouds, a greeny cerulean along the path to Iceland . . .
Well, that was my take on the weather one day last week, the computer thirsty for words. Down at the west of the Dingle peninsula, Trish Howley and Sandra Landers started e-mailing a piece to each other every day, to encourage each other's writing. They enjoyed it so much they kept it up for a year. The result is 333 pages of a book I'd give for Christmas to anyone happy in an anorak. Weather Watch, (€15.99 from www.utterpress.com) had to be written by women of a lively kind, sisters doing it for themselves - that kind of candour and eagerness. It doesn't bother overmuch with biography, but lets the two lives emerge day by day, entwined with whatever blows in from the Atlantic. Howley is Irish and an Irish speaker, busy in local theatre and living in a caravan above Ventry Bay. ("I sit on the loo-with-a- view, door wide open to the moonlight and the ocean roar.")
Landers is American, a book artist, renting a house above Blasket Sound, a short if windy walk from Krugers and winter sessions of sean-nós. It helped the writing, of course, to have such a spectacular landscape, and kaleidoscopic weather that never does anything by halves.
Pegged-out clothes stream horizontal from the line: "I cannot tell if they yearn to hold on or yearn to escape, these frantic banners in the night." The hills dissolve in sepia-coloured fog or spawn astonishing moons. Things happen in life: the buying of a house; excursions abroad; but sky, sea and mountains are donned with the daily apparel.
The e-mails began in November, 2004. On December 6th - today - in a run of grey weather, Howley looked out to a Zen-calm bay: "shining water, undulating, hypnotic, stretches away into the cloud cupola. Dream stuff. No substance. Not far from the shore, the water is muted pale green, reflected light, which at the harbour mouth turns to palest mauve, seeping skyward . . ."
Landers, heading off for a trying day of driving and mortgage talk, finds the same sea "a sustaining colour, sending the pleasure of it deep inside. Calming. All the rest of the day, the trina chéileday, amidst the upset, I look for water."
There are almost as many skies and colours and changing moods as there are pages in the book: some delicate as watercolours, others vivid and slashing or stilled with mist. The ocean awes and exhilarates. "Today," writes Howley, in a January gale, "was the day for busting out, breaking the cabin fever, offering oneself to the wind." Sandra agrees, pulling on wellingtons and gloves and "racing out the door for the cliffs. At Faill Cliath, the entire cove is turned to white, and as a wave breaks, scatters of spray are sent whirling into the air as if some giant child below were at play with bubbles. I twirl and twirl again in the wind, laughing as it nearly knocks me over." Well, you can't do that in Drumcondra. But for those landlocked and cocooned in towns and apt to dream at windows, this book of days offers great pictures for the mind's eye and sea-grist for the soul.
In a different key, Mark Roper's poems summon up the countryside, its birds, people, cows and all. Even So (Dedalus Press, €14.00) selects the best from his well-praised previous collections and adds new poems written in his chosen Tobernabrone in Co Kilkenny. Here are wry, sharp, empathetic pieces including a new one about snow, perhaps from childhood: "Even though it's dark when you wake,/ you know it has snowed. A chill silence/ under the curtain. Cold glow on the wall." Later: "Your own footprints/ follow you wherever you go. And it's best/ to keep going, through mauve and indigo shadow . . ." Such poems, in the end, may be all we have left of winter.
• Ireland's Ocean: A Natural History by Michael Viney and Ethna Viney has now been published by The Collins Press, Cork