Many of the themes of Katherine Duffy's The Erratic Behaviour of Tides (Dedalus, £5.95) are standard first-collection fare: memories of significant childhood events, of parents and grandparents, and poems concerned with travel. Linking these explorations is a consciousness of the impermanence and unpredictability of inner states symbolised by Duffy's emphasis on weather and the erratic tides of her title.
Although almost all of these poems are short lyrics and for the most part formally unsatisfying, there is an evident gift for aphorism in "Transaction" and a gentle, whimsical wit in "Restorers v. the Ceiling Vandal" or "The Snow Queen in Spain". This collection indicates promise, but its development may be dependent on Duffy's choosing to broaden her range from the delineation of "elusive shades of feeling".
For an admirer of Medbh McGuckian, Shelmalier (Gallery, £7.95), described as "her most ambitious collection", is likely to prove disappointing. Uniquely for a Mc Guckian collection, it also announces the bedrock of its inspiration as the United Irish uprising of 1798. But this poet is not renowned for making concessions to comprehensibility and Shelmalier is no exception.
There are few, if any, recognisable points of cultural or historical reference, and these verbally intense but conceptually vague poems fail to convince that they are "about" anything in particular. They may start from a crystalline idea or historical fact, but by the time they reach the page they are so encrusted with metaphor and simile that the result is a weirdly featureless equivalence. This is loading every rift with ore with a vengeance. The characteristic grace and strength of McGuckian's syntax are still in evidence, but because of their determination not to be enslaved by reference, the conviction of the poems' opening statements rings hollow:
Sleep made a market of my voice like a night march through Connacht or the sea's slack tides initiating.
We may appreciate the imagery and sense the poet's urgency, but our efforts to fully appreciate are frustrated. McGuckian's themes are frequently lost in the self conscious gorgeousness of her constructions: her expressions about 1798 or present-day political strife run the risk of being too personalised to interest the reader, and her amorphous metaphoricity can lead to some unintentionally ludicrous effects, as with "birds are the only creatures who can feel/ two things at once", or, worse, "my heart in your mouth is a tan-coloured telephone". There are moments of utter impenetrability and grammatical sloppiness, as in this stanza from "The Feastday of Peace":
Their lace-curtain Irish anchoring the moon-lines along the twisted sea-coast chafes like a boat in a sky-voyage the English meaning so unlike language.
One is hard pressed to know exactly what McGuckian is on about here. Her use of the description "a melanic sky anastomoses" in "Using the Cushion" can have no intention other than to send her readers scurrying to their dictionaries: it is an incongruous and pretentious obstacle to understanding in this short lyric. Shelmalier is also ill-served by the creeping influence of academic jargon such as "nonduality" or the irritatingly vague "otherness", and despite highlights such as the title sonnet or the lovely "The Birthday of Monday", these poems leave a pleasant arriere-gout but make no strong claim on the memory. At its worst, Shelmalier is a caricature of the techniques which elsewhere make McGuckian's work exciting. Plainly, a poetry that refuses to denote is a double-edged weapon. By contrast, Mark Roper's The Home Fire (Abbey Press, £4 in UK) is a model of precision and lucidity. The fourteen poems contained in this exquisitely produced cloth-bound pamphlet from are primarily concerned with natural phenomena, reflecting on the place of the human observer within the landscape. Like so many recent voices, Roper's debt to Heaney is clear, but what distinguishes Roper is the unerring accuracy of his language, as when he describes "a robin's dull ember/ in the wreck/ of a tree". Roper's speculations have a delicate and uncoerced quality; he is more likely to be overwhelmed by his subjects, as in the marvellous short poem "Sleeping with the Kingfisher", than to impose his ideas forcibly upon them.
The Home Fire serves as an effective appetiser in advance of Mark Roper's next, full collection.