`Is this my life?" asks Micheal O'Siadhail in the opening poem of his new collection, Our Double Time (Bloodaxe, £7.95 in UK), setting the tone for the volume's philosophising, restlessly questioning style. The titles of these poems indicate abstraction: "Passivity", "Ageing", "Knowing", "What If", "But If", and the abstracting tendency frequently dominates until it is impossible to identify precisely what O'Siadhail is writing about. Thus the short poem "One" ends: "Yearning. Longing leaving its trace./One agony. One grief. A staring gap./Unique memory of one enfolded face."
The trouble here is that despite asserting a poetic truism, Haecceitas, or the "thinginess" of things, O'Siadhail is generalising himself out of existence. His mode is rhetorical rather than mimetic, making his declared debt to Rilke in the volume's eponymous poem seem curiously unconvincing: "Enough to laud the ring, the clasp, the jar./Shapes, the light, colours. No need to explain."
O'Siadhail explains ad nauseum nevertheless. His constant affirmations of value have a distasteful breast-beating quality to them, climaxing with the unabashed emotionalism of his title poem: "No matter how or when, no matter where, ../I love and am loved. All my tinyness rejoices/ That I'll have been a voice among our voices."
The deadening accuracy of his rhymes and the undisrupted exactitude of many of the forms he utilises also contradict his stated intention, formally closing off the spiritual possibilities he so rigorously affirms and rendering them trite, particularly in his sonnets: "Will this livelong day be long enough for love?" Elsewhere, an enthusiasm for music is conveyed with verve, only to be spoiled by a wholly unnecessary attempt to describe what a Beethoven string quartet is like to listen to. This is poetry which is in desperate need of liberation from the protestations of the first person singular.
The scorchingly personal quality of Catherine Phil MacCarthy's second collection, The Bible Globe (Blackstaff, £6.99 in UK), is decidedly more convincing. The volume is composed for the most part of beguiling short lyrics, executed with skilful economy and a painterly deftness. MacCarthy's eye for detail is both accurate and moving -
your missal fat as a tick with mortuary cards and prayers, a Cadbury's box of letters you read fragments from knitting patterns (Grace Kelly blondes, For Men in cable sweaters)
- and the mysterious spareness of poems such as "Acts of God" or "Marooned" is highly effective. There is a clear debt to the Heaney of North in "Lucy's Song": "Uncover my bones, long dead and clean,/ The moon of my skull that gleams in the mire ...", and there are echoes of Eavan Boland elsewhere. But Mac Carthy's avoidance of the temptation to generalise works to her credit; these poems quietly convey a powerful sense of the value of experience, especially in the delicately erotic "Thirst", and in "Fires." Few of the poems are longer than a page, and their lineation is similarly tight; lines containing only two or three words are commonplace. One feels that MacCarthy could easily stretch herself to longer, more ambitious forms without compromising her poise and control, and that future collections would benefit from this variety.
Volume 13 of the new Penguin Modern Poets (Penguin, £7.99 in UK) series contains the work of Michael Hofmann, Michael Longley and Robin Robertson. Hofmann's characteristic hard-edged stylishness is evident in the inclusions from his previous three collections. His observation has a clinical quality reminiscent of Robert Lowell: "Even the piss- artist, rocking back and forth/ on the balls of his feet like a musical policeman,/is making an irreversible commitment . . . he shivers." Lowell's influence is evident too in Hofmann's unsettling abruptness, his use of ellipses and his emphasis on the artificial: "crumbling slightly/each time the bells tolled, not real bells/but recordings of former bells, and never for me." Robin Robertson's inclusion in this volume on the strength of a first collection is surprising. A Painted Field won the 1997 Forward prize for Best First Collection, but the derivative quality of many of these poems is undeniable. Tellingly, one of the best poems in this selection is a powerful translation from Ovid, "The Flaying of Marsyas." Michael Longley, arguably Robertson's strongest influence, has here provided a generous selection of his own work, a comprehensive introduction to his achievement. From the humour and virtuosity of "Words For Jazz Perhaps" or "Halley's Comet" to "Kindertotenlieder", a poem which manages to be momentous in just six lines, Penguin Modern Poets 13 is worth buying for this inclusion alone.
Caitriona O'Reilly is a writer and critic