The rough and the smooth

POETRY: When Love Is Not Enough: New And Selected Poems,by Maurice Harmon, Salmon, €12; No Place Like It,by Hugh O'Donnell, Doghouse, €12

MAURICE HARMON was one of the best-known figures in the field of Anglo-Irish studies and a recently retired professor at University College Dublin when he began a second life as a poet.

In the past 10 years he has published three collections and a book of translations, as well as editing Poetry Ireland Review.Now, in the year of his 80th birthday, Salmon has published a celebration of his work, Honouring the Word,as well as this New and Selected Poems. In Thomas McCarthy's poem for Harmon in Honouring the Word,he imagines and pays tribute to the kind of obliviousness in which a poem is written:

Starlings like poets have no concept of the wide world,

Not for them what is orchestral or a larger master plan

In his first collection, The Last Regatta(2000), Harmon's short poems are often lyrical and reflective, though never quite oblivious to their poetic context. Figures ends, like an out-take from Thomas Kinsella's Downriver:

I could follow that dark shape,

That frail, indomitable form into the night,

the mist opening out, then closing at my back.

That first book's long poem, The Search, draws on Native American myth (Harmon studied and taught in the US for a number of years) and uses a short, clipped line and close-up images to good effect, aiming at a tone markedly different from the more open and discursive exposition of succeeding volumes.

Harmon's spell as editor of Poetry Ireland Reviewallowed him a vantage point on contemporary Irish poetry and its continuing traditions, and this, alongside his critical studies of Austin Clarke and others, has clearly influenced his choice of subjects in these later collections. Clarke's itinerary poems shape Harmon's tour through The North Road,and Clarke's satires on Irish institutions and his autobiographical accounts of his and his family's experiences of Church and State rumble in the background of Harmon's portraits of politicians and Christian brothers, although they lack the violence and timeliness of Clarke's satires; worthy as testament and in sentiment, they do not surprise the reader when they lament the selfishness of the princes of the State and Church.

The Mischievous Boy,the title poem of his most recent collection, is a much weirder and more original poem on this theme: it also describes a generational struggle that centres on sexual repression, but this is nicely unbalanced by its supporting cast of goldfinch, hawk, fox and chicken.

Harmon's satires also extend to poetry, or po-biz, as in Dear Editor, which caricatures a tyro poet's address to an elder-statesman type, and The Making of a Poet. A Wife's Complaint,which offers a wild and compressed account of a poet's journey from early achievement and sexual happiness to disappointment and domestic abuse.

Harmon insists on a blunt and unsophisticated honesty in the satires, and clearly sets out to include the rough as much or more than the smooth. The same impulse characterises the unvarnished and affecting accounts of parent-child relationships and intergenerational failures of understandings that are scattered through this various selection.

HUGH O'DONNELL'S No Place Like Italso tries to see the world as it is, its poems serving as evidence of a social moment but without transforming or using that material for its own ends. The first half offers short bystander's sketches of the underbelly of contemporary city life, interspersed with injunctions such as "Look interested, don't forget to smile", which seem pessimistic about their own ability to do anything other than report the dilemmas they describe. O'Donnell uses some intriguing frames, including a short sequence, A Little Terror,structured like crime fiction but with no denouement: Hit Man, Scene of the Crimeand Interview are followed by the ironically titled Chamber Music, which describes a brutal interrogation. The book's second half is more personal than social, and dwells on hospital visits and elegies, though there is sardonic gloominess as much as consolation in these poems, as in H arvest Festival,which begins:

Flown in specially for the season

of squashy fruit, designer-dark,

she keeps it light (world hunger)

as there are people to be thanked.

John McAuliffe co-directs the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. He has published two books with Gallery Press, and a pamphlet of poems, A Midgie, is just out from Smith/Doorstop