Poetry: If you take a walk down towards Dún Laoghaire harbour, just under the recently refurbished fountain, you will find engraved on a stone plinth 'Asylum Harbour', a poem commissioned by Dún Laoghaire Harbour Company last year.
The poem, by Gerard Fanning, dedicated to the workers who built Dún Laoghaire harbour, is a perfect piece in a perfect setting. In its place of honour it is due civic recognition for a poet who has been quietly but consistently charting what he describes in 'Asylum Harbour' as the sonar and sirens of memory.
Since the 1970s, Fanning, writing a highly distinctive, unforced and resonant poetry, has developed his range and pitch from the award-winning Easter Snow (1992) to his second collection, Working for the Government (1999). In this interim volume, Canower Sound, Fanning has produced a long poem of (mostly) inter-related couplets, snapshots of a real west of Ireland coastline but also of powerful illuminations of the self caught in the crosslights of changing times and other places. The relish for particular worlds of the here and now rebound against what the Internet refers to spookily as "unknown zones":
Now that everyone is gone,
Nothing interrupts silence
Except a goat's song.
(As is characteristic with Fanning's allusiveness it really doesn't matter that much if the reader picks up the reference - in this case, I suspect, to Dermot Healy's novel.) The visual world that has been at the heart of Fanning's work takes on in Canower Sound a new-found definition and there is a confident delight in seeing it revealed in these nimble images.
Fanning's contemporary, Harry Clifton, has published six volumes to date since The Walls of Carthage, his first, appeared back in 1977. He has also written a fine travel memoir, On the Spine of Italy (1999), and a collection of short fiction, Berkeley's Telephone (2000). God in France, an attractively produced sequence of 11 poems, is a celebration of Elsewhere, of difference, of the liberating sense of being, as Clifton has it in the title poem, "Adrift on the everyday, street life, glass cafés/ . . . my chosen ground".
It is a thoughtful, calm, almost metaphysical "ground" that these poems traverse, again marked with a beneficent confidence in being out in the world, abroad as we once had it, amazed by what the world can offer:
A young Vietnamese
In her sunken tea-room, laying out white china,
Bowls and teapot, steaming green infusion
At the heart of a heat-raddled city -
The small thing done well.
Which is really all we ask for, I guess, and Clifton provides such moments in abundance in God in France. If Paris is central to Clifton and the Connemara coastline is the originating source of Fanning's long poem, Rome, with its shadows, fountains, domes and pressure, comes and goes throughout Paul Murray's work. In his new volume, These Black Stars, the Mournes homeland also surfaces as a backdrop to the concluding poems of hope and restoration.
Murray has published three previous volumes, one for each of the last three decades: Ritual Poems (1971), Rites and Meditations (1982) and The Absent Fountain (1991). Alongside these volumes he has also written an important study, T.S. Eliot and Mysticism (1991). Clearly the possibility of the spiritual in the contemporary world underscores his writing life. These Black Stars, the title drawn epigraphically from Iris Murdoch, is a collection of prayer-like poems, brief but tonally unified by the questioning yet steady voice that carries throughout the book a pervasive sense of time passing and subsequent recognition of loss:
And do not be amazed
If you can still hear the sound
That wakes in you
So many memories. Listen
And listen deep and well. Then
Let them pass.
Mary O'Donnell's new collection, September Elegies, her fourth since Reading the Sunflowers in September (1990), is a bit of a puzzle. For some reason the contents pages are included at the end of the book which certainly threw this reader off kilter. In these days of relatively cheap access to the highest values in typesetting and book production, Lapwing, who have done so much in promoting previously unknown or neglected writers, need a typographical makeover. Set in these terms O'Donnell's poems are up against it. In many instances they are caught too much within the rhetorically stated ("I long to forget/ gravy and grease, to stroll/ through the cornfield across the road, / be part of its yellowness") and insufficiently released into more eloquently achieved form. The emotional dexterity and depth the poet essays in this tripartite collection ('September Elegies', 'Hauntings' and 'Antidotes') is most effective in those lyrics where the images are allowed to look after themselves without intrusive directional comment, as in the splendid opening of the second stanza of 'Solstice':
The lakes stretch out in loops,
Like the eyes of slowly blinking water gods,
Shorelines knotted with submerged boats,
As the ground squelches and soaks.
Canower Sound By Gerard Fanning, with drawings by Ann Bourke Shinbone Press, 24pp. €15
God in France: A Paris Sequence, 1994-1998 By Harry Clifton Metre Editions, 31pp. €7
These Black Stars By Paul Murray Dedalus Press, 72pp. €10 pbk/€16 hbk
September Elegies By Mary O'Donnell Lapwing Publications, 64pp. npg
Gerald Dawe has published six collections of poetry, most recently The Morning Train (1999) and Lake Geneva (2003), as well as The Rest is History: A Critical Memoir (1998). He is lecturer in English and co-director of the graduate creative writing programme at Trinity College, Dublin