Desmond O'Grady's poetry has made a special contribution to our literature. He has always written in unfashionably declamatory or didactic styles, and has been a trifle adversarial from time to time. This may explain why his work has, like George Moore's fiction, been discounted by critics who would confine "pure poetry" to the personal lyric, as Moore had wanted to in his day.
This substantial work has its share of short first-person lyrics, but its forming principle is comparable to Whitman's Song of Myself. His versification varies from a strict Petrarchan sonnet to very open, free-verse forms, even prose. The tone too varies from scornful diatribe to classical elegy. He traces the emergence of Celtic cultural influence from primal origins to its immersion in, and perhaps subversion of, Roman civilization. After his laconic elegy for Hugh O'Neill's death in Rome in 1616, he turns to memoirs of his own time in Rome, "here in ghettoed exile from exile".
This gives ample scope for shameless name-dropping, fond memories of love affairs and sad partings. Then he returns to the central theme, tracing Celtic motifs among the Arabs and the Irish. The chronicle is spangled with versions of the Song of Solomon, The Book of Job (the Moorish version?), Egyptian papyri of 12th century BC, and Sedulius Scottus.
Flat diction and solipsism intrude occasionally, but the sheer energy and sweep of this new work is irresistible.
A Wren-boy's Carnival, by Gabriel Fitzmaurice. Wolfhound Press, 144 pp., £12.99 hb., £6.99 pb
The sub-title on the cover of Gabriel Fitzmaurice's new book reads "Poems 1980-2000." About half the poems are new. Declan Kiberd's introduction is not just an extended "blurb," but a measured "placing" of the poet between the local and the global, "the community in transition, where the Sacred Heart lamp has been replaced bythe TV set and the pattern-day by an outing to McDonald's."
Not unlike those of Goldsmith and Burns, these poems are endowed with charm, wit, and generosity of spirit. They delineate and celebrate the lives of the people Fitzmaurice lives among in the Kerry village of Moyvane, where he is a teacher. He transcends sentimentality to effect what that redoubtable school inspector Matthew Arnold would recognise as "a criticism of life". His staple forms are derived from the ballad and the nursery-rhyme, with cunning admixtures of sonnets, a villanelle, and translations-including a wild Whitmanesque translation from Cathal ╙ Searcaigh.
Is there a mildly subversive sub-text here? Many poems have completely superfluous footnotes, like " Dβil: (Irish) Parliament of the Irish Republic (pronounced Dawl)" which add to the entertainment. His elegies and love-poems are direct, moving evocations; his poems to and about friends and neighbours will make you wish you were among them, even to have him poke gentle fun at you.
Hopkins on Skellig Michael, by Paddy Bushe. The Dedalus Press, 68 pp, £11.95 hb, £6.95 pb
Another sterling Kerry scholar and poet, Paddy Bushe, writes with deceptively quiet cadences about the enduring subjects-the natural world, art and love and, centrally, "death of fathers". The latter sequence comprises stern, urgent poems on the illness and death of his father.
The title sequence, prompted by one of G. M. Hopkins's "terrible sonnets," evokes the physical and spiritual struggle of Fr. Hopkins, the exile-priest, on a retreat to "the most extreme corner of this most extreme land," the monastic hermitage among the crags of Skellig Michael. A carved Eskimo bear reminds him, "Art is the magic/Of craftsman and shaman."
This collection, unassuming and quotidian on the surface, partakes of its share of craft, though its spirituality has more to do with the parish curate than the shaman.
Day Release, by Aidan Rooney-CΘspedes. The Gallery Press, 71 pp., £13.95 hb., £7.95 pb
Aidan Rooney-CΘspedes, recipient of several prestigious awards in the 1990s, has only recently published a first collection. He belongs to a group of Irish-born poets, most of them based abroad, who are attempting to globalize, as if with concerted deliberation, the roughly neo-classical style (and much of the substance) of their poetry. A fascinating enterprise, to be observed in the pages of Metre, one of the many magazines where this poet's work has appeared.
When the subject is as amusing as 'Retro Creation', or as exasperating as 'Turkey Plucking', Rooney-CΘspedes has precisely the right approach. But he too often lavishes a hectic prolixity on a range of subjects while trying to sustain a casual, carefree tone in the manner of the later Muldoon. His sonnet "Haircut" is characteristic: an interesting aperτu, "the forsaken side of yourself others/always get. Like characters in Beckett . . ." is smothered with extravagant phrases, a jigging metre and jazzy, obtuse rhyming. ("I always check the right-hand margin of a rhyming poem," Robert Frost remarked once, "to see which won, the rhyme or the poem.")
Admirers of Paul Muldoon's recent poetry are usually dismayed by his imitators; there are, after all, certain poets - e. e. cummings, Edith Sitwell, Dylan Thomas - who are inimitable.
The University of Arkansas Press has just published James J. McAuley's new collection of poems, Meditations, With Distractions