Scenes out of an Ireland in the mind's eye

THE brand new wellingtons on the tall man, in Bill photograph, looking into the window of J.J

THE brand new wellingtons on the tall man, in Bill photograph, looking into the window of J.J.Moriarty's shop, under the Afton Sold Here icon and the disembodied dress hung in the door frame, says it all. Kerry Slides shifts in focus from the diary like entries of, Paul Muldoon's by now characteristically underscored poems of inventiveness and play to the eye catching shots of Bill Doyle, in which he shows his respect for the disappearing traditions of what were once known as The Irish People.

The Wrenboy's wand that clatters down the slates of "a damp/ little holiday cottage in Camp in 1969 opens and closes Muldoon's poetic inventory, which takes in as much as can possibly not be spelled out

Though it may seem as Irish as Brian Boru the fuchsia's blown in here from Chile or Peru, its flower a red flare sent up by the crew of a sinking ship, the Monbretia, whose life rafts they lower like buckets into a shaft where little orange life vests bob grimly fore and aft.

And that's your lot Ireland may as well be Chile or Peru when you look at Doyle's photograph on page 44 of a woman by an open fireside. What comes through Kerry Slides the man carting spades and rope through a grave side, the burial sites taken for granted, drawing water from a well, even the dance in the lounge bar under the gaze of JFK and (I think) Dan O'Connell is just how porous the intersections are between one culture and the next until they are blocked off by political need.

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Muldoon's poems seem to hover like an exquisite metal detector over the ground of such contradictions and possibilities.

"Not only do Dingle houses effervesce/like sherbets in rain/giving one a sense of Fez/perhaps, or somewhere in Spain." But it is all down to who is doing the sensing. Muldoon's own sensibility is to see the exotic in every thing and every place his eye lights upon, to such an extent that this reader wouldn't have minded some things being left well enough alone

Ventry Strand. Here Fionn and the Fianna first hurled themselves against the Rest of the World.

Ironic chanciness ("hurled") doesn't quite take away here from the Mystique (as against Martinique) of "auld" fashioned, Irishness. If Charlie Haughey is reminiscent of Buffalo Bill Cody, whereas Paisley's face is time warped still "in a blind rage", the scallops "tossed in `extra virgin' oil" show just how laid back everything has become, except, that is, when one starts to hear voices. "And I followed that voice into/the graveyard to a grave that ran like a gutter/with slurry, to a skeleton, a coarse seamed skull. I am the one of whom Pierce Ferriter/wrote that his heart still smouldered like a coal/on account of her `cold ardour'." The couplet that seems a "cobalt quiffed ewe" as part blue rinsed Grandmama, part Sid Vicious" bizarrely imitates ("mama") and domesticates the landscape historical as much as ceremonial which elsewhere appears shockingly lonely and, in Doyle's photograph of the scare crow, possessed of Psycho like unreality as well.

This is a fascinating book of images drawn by two artists clearly taken by a part of the country they have stayed in over many years an Ireland, that is, in the mind's eye.