The Mason's Tongue. By Adrian Rice. Abbey Press. 60pp. £8.95 in UK
The Sea With No Ships. By Frank McGuinness. Gallery Press. 74pp. £7.95
No Can Do. By Julie O'Callaghan. Bloodaxe. 93pp. £7.95 in UK
A first full collection, The Mason's Tongue sports a handsome Colin Middleton reproduction on its front cover and a spray of artfully qualified endorsements from established poets such as Seamus Heaney and Ruth Padel on its back. The poems have an unfashionable, unabashed directness of procedure appropriate to the plainspoken values of the northern Presbyterian tradition they interrogate. Most of them are set in Islandmagee in County Antrim, in a dreamtime of religious and political dissent. Adrian Rice is fascinated and repelled by the certainties of his native tradition, whether manifested in the Witch Trials of the early 18th century or the Orange marches of his own day. In "The Musicians' Union" and "The Dummy Fluter" he bears clear-eyed, uncondescending witness to what Orangeism looks like to a thoughtful member of the community which nourishes it. This ground has been traversed in poetry before, by Tom Paulin, but Rice's approach is both more intimate and more down-to-earth: his bemused dismay could hardly be further from Paulin's snarling academic ironies. The most vivid poems in the book excavate local lore. Particularly memorable are the title poem and the haunting, adroitly turned "The Drowning". Perhaps what is most valuable in Rice's writing is its generosity, its openheartedness to the poet's own community and also to other, readerly communities whose value systems may be very different. Some slippages of tone notwithstanding, this is an interesting, distinctive volume by a new, if not a young poet (Rice is 42).
The Sea With No Ships is a second collection, though a 10th book, by the creator of a series of acclaimed plays. These seem very much the poems of a dramatist, for whom poetic form comes as a distant third priority after character and ideas. Many of the poems arise from interesting, even grand conceptions, but are too muddled in register or too slapdash in style to bear out their promise. While most are enlivened by striking lines and passages, only a handful can be described as wholly successful. Among these are "Solomon", at once an elegy for Maire de Paor and a meditation on the constrictions of her and the poet's native Buncrana, and the rapturous soliloquy "Lavender". Best of all is the extravagant "Mrs McDermottroe". Voiced, like many of the other poems, by a woman and set, like a number of them, simultaneously in a historical epoch and in the contemporary world, this monologue exhibits a perfect consonance between McGuinness's ambition and his linguistic technique. Mrs McDermottroe's wild garrulity is convincing because it is entirely in character .
No Can Do is a third collection, Julie O'Callaghan's long awaited follow-up to her much admired What's What? (1991). O'Callaghan's subtle ear for the intonations of speech, her appalled delight in the things language is made to do in our consumer-crazed era - particularly, but not only, in her native North America and her shrewd handling of line endings mark her as a true poet, someone with an almost deranged interest in the possibilities and impossibilities of words. The book opens with a series of mock Japanese court poems, witty, understated sallies on the social niceties which must be observed in any society if interpersonal exchange is to take place. The middle section of the volume offers further satirical monologues of the type perfected in her earlier collections. The best of these are admirably sharp, and a poem on American tourists in the Long Room at Trinity College brings her native and adopted countries into suitably confused, mutually uncomprehending relationship. O'Callaghan has always been a smart-ass poet, a step ahead of the street-wise grotesques to whom she gives voice. While her gifts for comedy and social observation are of a high order, her facility in highlighting the risible in the quotidian has at times seemed to run the danger of reductiveness, of foreclosing on the possibility of her developing a more personal mode of utterance. The third section of her book, however, a series of elegiac reminiscences of her late father, touchingly vindicates her offhand, quirky approach to poetry. Though one might wish for more extended poems - even these elegies are made by stringing together small, sometimes tiny vignettes - No Can Do is O'Callaghan's best book yet. Buy it.
Patrick Crotty is Head of English at St Patrick's College, Drumcondra