The central figure of Scarecrow (Gallery Press, £12.95/ £6.95) allows Sean Lysaght to play with a landscape that is at once occupied and uninhabited. This is a poetry of elements, of landscape conjured up through the naming of its gentlest details. It concerns itself with finding ways to occupy or claim the landscape, from map-making to landscape painting; from poaching to bird-watching; from naming place-names to naming flowers and fish. In "Watching Trees", the poet imagines how easy it would be to pass from human to natural form: he admits: "you could join them now / with disposable bags tied to your wrists / and tinsel streamers fluttering in your hair." In some of this volume's best poems, the scarecrow becomes an emblematic, archetypal figure that flurries at the border of the human and the natural worlds. "Island Scarecrows" looks at how scarecrows are made on three western islands, Clare Island, Inishmore and Inishbofin. With his characteristically spare but acute imagery, Lysaght observes:
Two vertical timbers and two cross-pieces: a capital H with a lid and an old anorak over them like a visitor's jacket draped on the back of a chair.
Lysaght is at his best when working a single image. His is the skill of the miniaturist, rather than the muralist. He works in neat forms that support taut and striking similes, and his unusual usage of questions and imperatives work to cancel a slight sense of over-quietness or monotony that might worry poems so closely linked by theme and tone.
The first poem of Mary O'Donnell's Unlegendary Heroes (Salmon, £6.99) offers poetry as a kind of alternative to a world "rank with injustice". It's a theme that recurs: the title poem, one of this collection's most assured successes, introduces a list of women whose various achievements have not been recorded in history or folklore. It's an incantatory poem, and its steady, reined-in form trims O'Donnell's occasional tendency to excessive rhetoric:
Phyllis McCrudden, Knocka phubble, who buried two husbands, reared five children and farmed her own land.
Ann Moffett, of Enagh, who taught people to read and did not charge.
This confident voice falters elsewhere. The second section of the book contains a number of poems written in the voices of other people, including Rodin's female apprentice; Emilia, creator of the Shell Cottage at Carton; and (rather unwisely) Sylvia Plath. This is a poetry of fractured voices, in the midst of which it is difficult to identify O'Donnell's own - something you don't expect to find in a poet's third collection. Several poems trickle away in the kind of free verse which seems governed more by narrative concerns than poetic considerations. The craftsmanship is not highly developed. The poems could benefit from the lyric reductiveness evident in "Infant", which provides a nice balance for some of the more grandiose poetic statements and strained imagery that occasionally threaten to overturn an already overwrought book.
Dermot Healy's success as a novelist has tended to overshadow his talent as a poet. His second collection, What the Hammer (Gallery Press, £12.95/£6.95), is the work of a poet who has an exciting command of poetic technique as well as an engaging capacity to surprise the reader. He has the novelist's eye for a good story, and the poet's ear for a language that is both light and wise, in which to carry it off.
He is the master of the changed direction: several of his poems shift narrative gear in the closing lines, to incorporate an unlikely image or unusual metaphor that echo after it, as in "The Old Chiefs" (here in its entirety):
Not till I'd seen the old chiefs trying to land their boats out of the world of myth did I hear the wheatear and the finch.
As in Scarecrow, Healy's poetry has a keen sense of locality and landscape, and several poems feature local people and their talk. Unlike Lysaght's, Healy's landscape is vulnerable, and liable to be overwhelmed by a sea which is "ever nurturing / always ram- pant", but which gives the book some of its most dominant and energetic images.
Healy's is a poetry of good humour. He is a master of the short poem, and several here are magically wise and comic. This is a poet who knows what he is doing, and his gentle hand and sharp tongue make this a collection that will be thoroughly enjoyed.