Poetry:Aidan Murphy's winning preface to Neon Baby ends with his identifying himself as a "a poet of interiors", the lone voice of the picture-house and bedsit.
Seán Lysaght's notes at the end of The Mouth of a River dwell wonderfully in the out-of-doors of the "Great Threshold" ("Tairseachán Mór") in the Nephin Beg range in north Mayo. This contrast of the teeming urban neighbourhood with the cantar of windy moorland frames well the vitality of each poet's reach for themes of personal - that is archetypal - and national - and by intention global - consequence. Lysaght and Murphy dwell in easily different - but complementary - autobiographical, literary, and cultural milieux.
Neon Baby uses a populist idiom grounded in the American Beats and in rock and punk lyrics not quite in the style of James Liddy or Paul Durcan. Murphy eschews the Irish lyric for the blues and sometimes rises to wise-guy ironies like MacNeice, as in Declaration of Independence: "My mother is a nuisance/ my home is mythical/ my reading is limited". In the enlarging urban worlds of Thatcherite London and 1990s Dublin, Murphy's faith in narrative suffers the fragmentation of personal crises, beginning most tellingly with his breakthrough collection, The Way the Money Goes (1987).
IN MURPHY'S POEMS, alert readers will discern not just the usual Joycean story of flight and freedom, but the more ethically difficult one of the émigré's return - of more melancholy accommodations to this life. The idiom Murphy has practised so well since 1985 does, however, have its pitfalls. Too often a line will spoil by telling the willing reader what to feel, as in Visiting Rights: ". . . the kids swing high on the iron galleon/ and the sunlight on their handsome limbs/ adds mawkish splendour". Other times, as in Flypaper Terrace, Murphy's lines and demotic lingo have terrific energy.
With its allusions to "Cromwell's god", its image of "dried orange peel", its heron in flight, its references to William Blake and the Famine, Elements, the first poem in Lysaght's collection, stakes a claim on themes traceable to Ó Rathaille, Mangan and Yeats. Indeed, Lysaght's The Mouth of a River focuses the reader on the River Owenduff opening on Tullaghan Bay, Co Mayo, and its open country, now a national park. At the centre of the book lies a topological narrative titled The O-, in 32 parts that renew canonical themes of land, language, individual liberty. Even with the aid of its Fenian aura-casting for Salmo, the leaper, narrative remains the challenge because - despite Montague's example, or Heaney's - storytelling is currently and unfortunately démodé.
Lysaght gives The O- an elegant overture in A Discovery, when the poet encounters another upland solitary and recognises that "he wasn't there to be hailed/ or challenged by someone who had got there/earlier, who would spoil an original story, . . .". Later, there's a cognate incident in which Lysaght's angler hails "the woman the flood applauded". Both Muse and Bureaucrat, the woman works for the Heritage Service, preserving the "beforelife" on her side of the burn.
Science and Gaelachas meld when she reveals a Paul Henry scene:
The harvesters came from another century,
stooped in their madder skirts over the
ground,
their faces cancelled by smears and
weather, . . .
Lysaght's "cancelled" reminds us that this aisling happens in our 21st century. She slings him some midge repellent, continues to collect data in her notebook, and he concludes: ". . . science couldn't redeem the pain stored there,/ that the blind past was punishment enough". That past opens into the Irish of part 30: "Bhí taibhsí i mo bhéal, ach ní raibh mé/ ábalta iad a shmahlú i dteanga mo mháthar". The poet's Virgil in these heathy burns, an upland drover named Johnny, turns his cattle out across the stream. One "shits in the water, for real," and another "raises/ its head, letting jewels fall back to this crown of a river" . We expect the common realism, but not that last glint of treasure.
THERE ARE PUZZLEMENTS in The Mouth of a River, as in Erris (2002). A practised reader can solve them by following Lysaght's lines of image and event into catchment of intuition, as happens with surprising power in his adaptation of Buile Shuibhne. In these pages, it is "Bird Sweeney" rather than Sweeney King that Lysaght animates by letting the curse from the cleric Ronán shape Sweeney into any bird at will, echoing the bird names of The Clare Island Survey (1991).
Lysaght stunningly adapts the fable to Baghdad or Belfast in The Burning City. Here, Sweeney's cries attempt to call all birds together in order to rescue "the kids/ in the pleading city". The story is ornate, the conceit complicated, but the expression is simple, elemental, unavoidable - and unlikely to be heard from another Irish poet.
Thomas Dillon Redshaw directs the Center for Irish Studies at the University of St Thomas in St Paul, Minnesota
The Mouth of a River By Seán Lysaght Gallery Books, 83pp. 11.85 (paper), €18.50 (cloth) Neon Baby: New and Selected Poems By Aidan Murphy New Island, 146pp. €12.95