POETRY: Long-Distance SwimmerBy Dorothy Molloy Salmon, pp 56, €12 Only this RoomBy Kerry Hardie Gallery, pp 59, €11.95 Facing the PublicBy Martina Evans Anvil, pp 61, £7.95 The Ark-BuildersBy Mary ODonnell Arc, pp 91, £8.99

THE PUBLICATION of Long-Distance Swimmermarks the completion of Dorothy Molloy's oeuvre, as announced by her widower, Prof Andrew Carpenter, in his preface to this third collection.

Reading Molloy can be a strangely anachronistic experience, not just because her three collections have been published posthumously. Her themes recall Plath’s Ariel; women tend to swim against a gynecological under-tow in both poets’ work. Where Plath’s psychodrama negotiates the father, Molloy’s negotiates the mother; where Plath has Lazarus, Christ and the Tarot, Molloy has saints, icons, and herbalism; Molloy’s familiars are her cats and dogs, Plath’s are crows and bees. These comparisons may appear crude, yet Molloy’s vocabulary too springs from Plath’s era: “tennis club hops”, “fizz and pop” and “hocus-pocus” appear in poetry where the loss of innocence is usually sudden and brutal. With rhymes such as “commet / dammit”, “neck / heck” and nursery-rhyme metres, Molloy’s cautionary tales (often set in Spain and France where she spent much of her early adulthood) are rarely subtle but they can be intensely effective, particularly when her narrative has a contemplative focus as in this alliterative game:

We have lost our bearings

in this atrium of leaf, branch,

twig and trunk.

We cannot find the star-blaze

where the six paths meet. Behold,

I send you forth with your beloved

son. Blinded,

I wait till you disappear over the brink. ( Tinderbox)

Several poems in this collection reprise others elsewhere but Molloy has been well-served by her editors; few read as drafts. A forthcoming study by Dr Gonzales Arias should shed light on the recurring stories in her work.

Only this Roomprovides an ascetic sequel to Kerry Hardie's last collection that travelled from Molloy's territory, the Spanish Pyrenees, to Eastern Europe, Australia and China. In The Silence Came Close, space for contemplation had to be preserved from the traffic of other people's conversation. In this, her fifth collection, community is renounced for the solitude of the mystic as suggested in her epigraph from the 14th century Sufi poet, Mahmud Shabistari:

‘I’ and ’you’ are the veil

Between heaven and earth;

Lift this veil and you will see

No longer the bond of sects and creeds.

Hardie’s heaven is pure serenity; in her opening poem, she admires the cold eyes of seagulls that “call out to something inside me / that is empty and fearless and fierce”.

Her early masterpiece, She Goes with her Brother to the Place of their Forebears, identified a repressed Protestant undercurrent to this ascetism; although Hardie travels far to lift the veil, the bond of sect and creed has to be consciously left behind. On Skellig Michael (visited before with cameras and tourists in her debut, A Furious Place), the monks' failure to leave behind artefact or shrine becomes a triumph of the via negativa:

What need had they of such?

They were the shrine.

The pattern and the pilgrimage.

The way.

Always mindful of the pastoral calendar, Only this Roommoves from harvest to mid-winter and the gathering of the dead. There are a couple of misjudged moves amid the chilliness – That Bookand the first section of Kells Prioryshow Hardie at her weakest when being deliberately off-hand – but at home in her favoured haunts such as Ballinskelligs Bay, the "luminous ground for this drifting, this talking" catches flame once again.

Like Hardie, Martina Evans has a dual reputation as poet and novelist and it is her talent for narrative that propels Facing the Public. Family lore and local anecdote from Cork to London are the stuff of these poems: the Christmas lock-ins at the family pub; a parent’s reprimand for cycling too freely; a child’s decision to bury a dead dog upright. None of these events in themselves seem to matter too much for all they are engagingly told. But the title and the sequencing call for greater attention. Throughout the book, children watch from the sidelines of adult life and hesitate about stepping forward, fearing the consequences.

On the cover is a striking photograph of six babies from the Hackney Workhouse sitting in a pram, their nurse standing over them. It is not a tender image. The book opens with memories of how the Black and Tans used children as informers. This is followed by a dramatic monologue in which a court welfare officer outlines the limits of her responsibility to a child. Three prose adaptations from Ernie O’Malley’s account of the War of Independence make for powerful, concluding poems. All together they suggest a larger thesis frames these recollections. It seems then that Evans’s title can be turned on its head; that this violence shaped the rearing of Irish children for generations, a legacy to which public servants failed to face up.

Sometimes

the singing voices from the bar were

very near,

they sang A Nation Once Againwhich

was

companionable. Or I'm nobody's child

which was like a soundless hole in my

throat . . . ( The Blue Room)

This is a deceptively casual and enjoyable collection.

Mary O'Donnell adopts a vatic tone for much of The Ark Builders, but her high wisdom is let down by conventional phrasing. Too often her stanzas build by supplementary clauses, lacking the argumentative force she has displayed elsewhere.

The Poulnabrone Dolmenrecounts a daughter's reluctance to be impressed by "Celtic marvels", generously described here as providing the "rightful grit" on the day. More of this grit might benefit the pattern of assertion, qualification and mythic consolation that tend to predominate here.

Selina Guinness is a lecturer in the department of humanities, IADT, Dún Laoghaire and editor of The New Irish Poets, Bloodaxe, 2004