Padraig Daly has been publishing poetry for 25 years, but has not had the attention he deserves from the critics. It may be that the combination of rural and religious themes discourages some readers. If so it is a pity, since these are the two modes which draw the best from him: poems of depth and harmony, a voice that resounds. From the earliest collection represented here, Nowhere but in Praise (1978), he has celebrated his native Co Waterford, its Gaeltacht and its literary voices. Tadhg Gaelach (who wrote devotional poems in the Dungarvan area in the late 18th century), as well as such outsiders as Raftery, and Seamus Dall MacCuarta, set off echoes in lines which have the careful pace of translated verse but are in fact often original - Daly is straining to see what they saw rather than to reproduce what they said. An allusive mode allows the praise of traditional riches:
The sleek greyhounds, The marvellous horses that raced the fields, The tall spectacular foals . . . (`Leagh')
He imagines old customs reconciling grief and hope, while appropriately his language contains words which, originally Gaelic (such as glam) have passed into spoken English:
People carry water home to bless the fields, Mourners move towards graveyards With glaums of daffodils. (`Easter')
Religious poetry now seems desperately difficult to write but Daly is often successful. His best poems on religious themes have an air of being fragments faithfully recorded and detached from a context, remaining mysterious and luminous:
The fox comes close to the house
On sunlit mornings of Summer
Before the ladies of the convent finish prayer . . .
He is there also in Winter
When darkness covers the earth
And everywhere. (`Divine Fox')
Or they can have another fidelity, the twist of translation: as when he follows Augustine or Tauler or the Scots Gaelic of Anna Nic Ealair:
Set the butterflies free,
Let the birds follow, out from their cages;
And the small exuberant pups (`A Thought from Tauler')
He can give such segments of insight the same reality as the episodes of his life as a priest; often bleak as when, outside the church at a friend's funeral,
. . . a Limerickman, down on his luck, Wonders whether he might trouble me for a pound . . .
or reminiscences of childhood in a traditional world as in the gleeful accuracy of `Old Nuns':
Beads rattled when they walked; Their long pockets held sweets and rainbow balls.
Daly's combination of Gaelic scholarship, long memory and a fresh vision recalls Michael Hartnett. He draws on and contributes to the same Munster tradition but presides over his own distinct parish within it.
Eilean Ni Chuilleanain teaches at Trinity College Dublin and is one of the editors of the literary journal, Cyphers.