Poetry:The word "sanas" is defined as "whisper, hint, suggestion" but it is also the root of the word "sanasaíocht", meaning "etymology".
In his current collection, Liam Ó Muirthile engages with the whispers of the past, but does so by way of engagement with life as it is and must be rather than as nostalgia:
Gach rud
a choinneáil
san aon lá amháin.
Gan againn
ar deireadh
ach é.
A nourishing, loving past is invoked in Seanathair, but the past can often be more insistent and troubling as it whispers in the present. The word "sanas" slips easily into "sanasaíocht" as language tries to deal with unresolved suffering and in an extended poem, ÁÉÍÓÚ, the poet uses the long vowels of the Irish alphabet to evoke a violent Christian Brother. When the poet sees him years later, he cannot find the inner strength that would allow him to approach the violent teacher, now a rather pathetic old man:
. . . chuaigh díom an tuin a aimsiú
chun na focail a chur in iúl
go ndéanfadh buíochas díobh
ar scála ÁÉÍÓÚ i dtiúin.
ÁÉÍÓÚ
i dtiúin.
These are poems of many moods, exploring with great wit on occasion the capacity for ambiguity inherent in language. In Grá Mór, Ó Muirthile plays endlessly with the pronunciation of the words "grá", "love" and "amour", ending with the final lines: "grámour/ grá mór."
A number of the poems take off from celebrated poems by Ó Muirthile's contemporaries, as when Gabriel Rosenstock's "Ní mian léi an fhilíocht níos mó" transposes into the first line of the poem Baile an Bhaird: "Ní mian liom an tseandacht níos mó". Ó mo bheirt Phailistíneach, Michael Davitt's poem on the suffering of Palestinian children during the bombing of Beirut in 1982, is powerfully invoked in Suantraí Sarah is Asmahane, a poem on the deaths of a mother and daughter during the bombing of Beirut in August 2006, the reference back to Davitt accentuating the poem's power by summoning that conflict's awful continuity.
Ó Muirthile's is a poetry which draws on a wide range of references and experiences: the visual arts, Chinese literature and society, the observation of nature. These accompany and embellish the biographical to realise an accomplished, mature art, a love poetry masterful in its language, ringing clear and true both on the page and on the accompanying recording.
MAN-MADE SUFFERING in the Middle East is also the theme of a sequence of poems in Cathal Ó Searcaigh's latest collection. In Cárta Poist chuig Yusaf san Iaráic, he stands at a door in Manhattan remembering an Iraqi lover who told him that a poet's heart is with oppressed peoples. But if Auden's poetry could make nothing happen, poetry in a minority language is even less audible in a world dominated by cacophony and conflict:
Caidé a thig liom a rá ach dearbhú duit
i dteangaidh bheag nach gcluintear sa
challán
go bhfuil mé leat go hiomlán . . .
Ó Searcaigh's poetry is marked by a wide thematic range. Erotic love and the evocation of landscape are prominent among these and in A dhúiche m'anama, he manages to site erotic possibility and yearning in the placenames and landscape of west Donegal. Recalling them in a Tibetan city of bazaars, "i gcathair ard, rua/ na mbasár", he lies with the landscape and rouses it to vivid life.
This collection involves formal stylistic experiment as well as thematic range. Oileán na marbh is a poem on the death of a child which takes its form and tone from the traditional Donegal song An Mhaighdean Mhara, a song of profound mystery which allows Ó Searcaigh to explore the unfathomable grief of a mother who has lost a child.
Ó Searcaigh is a poet gifted with a wonderfully original imagination. This is evidenced throughout the collection, not least in Cuibhrinn, where the sheep in a distant field act as paperweights which prevent the fields from slipping into a chasm:
Ach go bé na caoirigh
atá ina suí orthu, á dtromú
mar mheáchain ar pháipéir
d'imeodh siad le fán
ina nduilleoga glasa
síos isteach sa duibheagán.
FINALLY, GABRIEL ROSENSTOCK'S Bliain an Bhandé (Year of the Goddess) is the only collection of the three under review to offer English translations. These are not mere cribs but poems in their own right.
Typographical experimentation is a marked feature of the collection. Bold type emphasises letter sequences which coincide with significant terms in Indian devotional poetry or which have a significance as words in their own right.
This practice is one which the poet says was "much cherished by the Celtic poets of yore". Thus the lines "Iompraíonn scáil na sceiche gile léi,/ Taoi amuigh ag siúl, ní foláir cosnochta" are offered in English as "Bearing with it the reflection of a fairy bush / You must be out walking, in Your bare feet."
Rosenstock is a poet of emptiness, desire and celebration whose poetry is delivered in an uniquely recognisable voice.
Proinsias Ó Drisceoil is the author of a forthcoming study of the 19th-century manuscript scribe, publisher, editor, religious controversialist and founder of learned societies, John O'Daly. Seán Ó Dálaigh: Éigse agus Iomarbhá will be published by Cork University Press
Sanas By Liam Ó Muirthile Cois Life, 86pp. €15 (includes CD)
Gúrú i gClúidiní By Cathal Ó Searcaigh Cló Iar-Chonnachta, 68pp. €12
Bliain an Bhandé (Year of the Goddess) By Gabriel Rosenstock Dedalus, 91pp. €11