Poetry: The Fifty Minute Mermaid Poems in Irish by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, translated by Paul Muldoon Gallery Press, 160pp. €13.90 'I know only one form of intellectual exchange", runs a line in the translation of the poem Aurora Borealis, "that just as the Borey Dancers prance in this particular way over the cold expanse of the heavens . . . so my poems, poor and puny as they may be,/ take off across the fluorescent screen of my mind and then down the page . . . ".
In this contemplation on the nature of poetic creativity, in which she explores the balancing of the emotional and intellectual, the spontaneous and the deliberate, that the writing of poetry demands, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill also provides her reader with a clue as to how to appreciate her work.
The Fifty Minute Mermaid, a dual-language book, consists of three of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's best-known poems - Mo Mháistir Dorcha, Dubh and An Obair - and 37 other poems, almost every one of which deals with the murúcha - meaning specifically mermaids or more generally supernatural sea-creatures, variously translated as merfolk, mer-person, merman, and most often mermaid, by Paul Muldoon. (The Hiberno-Irish "merrow" might have been useful but there may be a reason for avoiding it).
The very word "murúch", dark and rough it sounds, is less gender-specific than the more common and beautiful maighdean mhara, and allows the poet the freedom to explore the whole world of the seafolk, which is what she does in this richly symbolic, highly personal, cosmogony. It is daring, to compose an entire book about mermaids, but it works superbly.
SOMETIMES THE MERFOLK in these poems are mirror images of the human race or specific communities; often they represent individual humans, as in several poems about a daughter figure and still more about a disgruntled mother, a fish out of water unhappy in her skin:
She hates nothing so much/ as being reminded of the underwater life that she led/ before turning over a new leaf on dry land.
Ní Dhomhnaill's characters are often misfits in the real world. But not always. In the lovely A Remarkable Admission, the human character is a merman who seems able to slip in and out of the sea at will (that he is a fisherman gives him a certain advantage).
The combination of the fantastic and the mundane has long been a hallmark of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's poetry and it is her sure-footed blending of the two that makes her poems so striking.