Journeys of self-discovery

Irish Poetry:  Poets, explicitly or obliquely, often refer to the physical topography of the "real world" to map the spiritual…

Irish Poetry:  Poets, explicitly or obliquely, often refer to the physical topography of the "real world" to map the spiritual geography of their inner landscapes.

Literary criticism has coined graceless terms such as "objective correlative" and "subjective correlative" to outline such a writing strategy.

Poetry's "credibility", as Seamus Heaney put it, lies in "its truth to life, in every sense of that phrase". This simple yet complex remark is appropriate to introduce the latest collections of two Irish women poets: Rosita Boland and Joan McBreen.

Dissecting the Heart marks a return of Rosita Boland's poetic persona to the Irish literary scene. An engaging journalist and an award-winning fiction writer, her second collection has been published 12 years after her vibrant début, Muscle Creek (Raven Arts Press, 1991).

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In her new book, Boland explores and expands the territory of her familiar preoccupations: museum and gallery exhibitions; travel at home and abroad; ethical and political intersections of public and private life, and the complex dynamics of feelings and relationships. In short, she addresses the blending contours of the outer and inner worlds in which she lives.

The intellectual and emotional co-ordinates of Boland's "journey of discovery" are charted through dialoguing dichotomies: the factual and the imagined, the natural and the artificial, the anatomical and the spiritual, the contingent and the transcendent. So Boland's poems are ultimately "stories of relationships", at times rational and controlled, at times instinctive and sensual.

In poems such as 'Imping' (to this reviewer, the book's best), 'Six Museums' and 'Teeth', her journalistic fact-finding pays dividends. When they work both in content and form, historical and biographical data are convincingly translated into poetry.

This method, however, is not always ideal or convincing and Boland's persistence with it saps some of its effectiveness.

Nonetheless, the verdict on Dissecting the Heart is that Rosita Boland is, in her own words, "ready for a reading/ of whatever lay ahead". Her readers should respond to this invitation.

Joan McBreen's third collection, Winter in the Eye: New and Selected Poems, collates her recent poetry and a selection from her previous two books, A Wind Beyond the Wall (1990) and A Walled Garden in Moylough (1995).

Her poetry, too, revolves around the meanings of and relationships between outer and inner landscapes. The closing lines of 'Poem in Autumn' (words that "burn through the blood,/ cold as gulls inland from the sea") and of 'The Other Side of the River' ("The river moves on its course,/ leaving me to forget myself or learn my place") are characteristic of this geographical and existential short-circuit.

Atmospheric changes, even when unexpected, are therefore the "logical" channels (sometimes too predictably so) of emotional changes. These connections, however, remain consistently crucial. They allow the poet to achieve a distinctive, comforting harmony between what happens and where and why it takes place.

The reader can immediately detect and partake of what could be termed the poet's cathartic acceptance of the "facts of life" - illness and loss, as well as familiar places and home, are dominant themes in her new poems. McBreen addresses them with honesty and voices them with an elegiac gentleness that gives her readers a sense of almost therapeutic tranquillity.

This is, perhaps, the reason why her personal stories are ultimately perceived and understood as universal ones. Poems such as 'The Terminology of Love', 'London in December' and 'Poppies in Dominic Street' (with its final line reminiscent of Montale: "and a field of poppies/ mad with light") are fine examples.

In 'Crediting Poetry', his 1995 Nobel Lecture, Heaney gives credit to poetry because it "can make an order as true to the impact of external reality and as sensitive to the inner laws of the poet's being". Distinct voices in contemporary Irish poetry, Rosita Boland and Joan McBreen have precisely this in common: their poetry testifies to the inner laws of their beings.

Marco Sonzogni is a critic, editor and literary translator

Dissecting the Heart By Rosita Boland The Gallery Press, 46pp, € 10

Winter in the Eye: New and Selected Poems By Joan McBreen Salmon Publishing, 92pp, € 12