Protestant Without a Horse, by Robert Greacen, Lagan Press, 66pp, £5.95in UK
Entering the Mare, by Katie Donovan Bloodaxe 78pp, £6.95 in UK
At 77, Robert Greacen has no need of invented histories The poems in Protestant Without a Horse reach deep into his past. What emerges is a collection of people and places, remembered for their shadows and echoes, their influence on his life.
Many are poems of commemoration, of both public figures and personal friends. The more public the subject, the less intense the poem, while the personal subjects are described with a gentleness and feeling that upbraids the hollowness of the more occasional pieces. "Aunt Tillie" describes how:
When mother went away
You took her place
You showed me how
To pull my socks on
Master the alphabet
Spell words like `icicle'.
In places, the poems fall under too many shadows. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a poet whose career began in the early l940s, there are clear echoes of Auden. Even one of the more striking pieces, "The New Commandments", loses something by owing too much to the Hermetic Decalogue of Auden's "Under Which Lyre". A nice poem about a youthful football game in failing light suffers from its obvious resemblance to Heaney's "Markings".
The roll-call continues: Drummond Allison, Nano Reid, Kavanagh, Marilyn Monroe, Ezra Pound and Stephen Spender sit a little fustily side-by-side in six short pages. The references give the game away: there is not much about this book that could ~e de-scribed as contemporary. Instead, there is a jaunty disrespect for cur-rent poetic preoccupations which accommodates the archaisms of the more idiosyncratic pieces. Yet his best work - those poems untroubled by sentiment and cliche' - can be very winning in their defiance of the predictable campaigns and projects of youth.
Entering the Mare, Katie Donovan's second collection of poems, concerns itself with female identity and the ways in which a feminine erotic can be located and described. She draws on the traditional narrative stocks of history, myth, folklore and religion to present stories of women who have been damaged and even de by the world in which they lived. Unfortunately, the achievement of the poems does not match the ambition of the project.
Donovan's is a poetry of the Big Theme: there are few moments of quietnessor lyrical relief. This results in an overall impression of clam our within the book, that frequently approaches rhetoric or, worse again, trite dogma. In "Out of Her Clay", the poet declaims against our treatment of the earth with all the sparkle of an environmentalist newsletter.
We use her open arms
for dumps and factories,
we pour our poisons
into her spawning beds,
we foul the sea.
Elsewhere, the impulses of narrative and poetry strain against each other. "Macha's Curse" retells the myth from Macha's point of view, but its combination of overwrought imagery and pedantic description makes for a language that is both troubled and weak.
The best poems in, the collection are those which refer to the poet's own extended (female) family and its legacies of bohemian artistry. There is a lyricism to these pieces which refuses the polemic of the more public poems. "Totem" is addressed to the poet's Iroquoise ancestor:
I imagine your torn days
keeping your eyes fixed
on the stark body
of a milk-limbed man,
hanging from a cross;
your dreams flooding
with the heads of wolves
and beavers...
Donovan's lathe-thin lines - few have more than six words - whisk the reader along at break-neck pace. But if you prefer your poetry powerful rather than fast, you may prefer a little less spur and just a little more rein.
Vona Groarke is a poet