With a sideboard cluttered with poetry trophies, and many of the lauded poems included here, John O'Donnell has managed to produce a coherent and unified second collection of what might have been the winners and the also-rans.
An amused tone is set in the opener, 'The Majestic', a poem about "those rain-filled afternoons/ in the summer we discovered sex" which delights in the memory of a local cinema full of "row on row/ of one-armed crucifixions" as the would-be lotharios sit "waiting for the action/ to begin". The poem's well-chosen opening phrase "For one week only" stands as both provocation and omen, licence and challenge.
The acquisition of knowledge, whether through learning or discovery, is the theme. There are poems about the birth of a child, a death which leaves "A gap in the fence only a child could fill" ('The Loss') and, even in those poems which choose a Bible story or Greek myth for their narrative line, there is usually enough feeling to make the well-made matter.
Now and then a discernible Heaney influence shadows the metrically assured, restrained diction, but O'Donnell is increasingly his own man and in poems such as the beautiful 'Rhythm Painting', for Tony O'Malley, he shows a growing confidence in his abilities.
The final poem, 'The Grip', describes an evening when the poet's father takes him out on the golf course, where the tensions and gaps in the father-son relationship begin to show. Here, as elsewhere, O'Donnell might be said to honour the events that generate his poems by avoiding the general and keeping, in this case literally, his eye on the ball.
From the outset, Noel Monahan's work has seemed determinedly fleet of foot, suggestive rather than descriptive, and (call the poetry police!) optimistic. The title poem of the Cavan-born poet's fourth collection, 'The Funeral Game', neatly illustrates his ability to deal with darker subjects through lightness of touch. Here a group of childhood friends for whom "Every shoe-box was a coffin" imitates the adult ritual of death, holding wakes and even issuing "death certificates/ To old crows, kittens, chickens . . ." The presence of so many poems which deal with animals ('Goat from Inchmore', 'The Black Pig' and 'Crane Dance' among them) indicates much more than a rural childhood familiarity and suggests instead a personal mythology, even a religion. In these largely spiritual poems, the presence of animals helps to earth a tendency to float.
On occasion given to poems with "a message" (such as 'Threnody For Rosie', which interrogates the Celtic Tiger in just too general a way), Monahan is most successful with shorter, strangeness-risking poems and, given this fact, is particularly good on children or the world from a child's point of view ('Christmas Yawned in Waterlane').
Sometimes his tendency to celebrate seems to bring an unnecessary softening of an image, as when a vision of 'The Brown Hare' at the end of the poem of that name vanishes "into the cool of the moon" and you just wish he'd written the stronger and more chilling word "cold".
Less formally assured than O'Donnell, Monahan still by times manages a terrific end-of-line double-take, as in his 'Morning Observations' where 'New clouds fall/ Into action", and on its own his description of an accordion player "Folding and unfolding the grief of the sea" ('Accordion Player') should recommend his work to a wider readership.
Mysterious and not always sure of itself, the best of his work has a hint of Native American animism about it - what I might call Cavan shamanism - and, given our blindness to our own natural world, is all the more welcome for that.
Pat Boran is a poet and programme director of the Dublin Writers' Festival