Though Thomas McCarthy and Dennis O'Driscoll are both forty-five and from Munster, and have published roughly the same number of "slim volumes" over the last twenty years or so, they have arrived at strikingly different junctures in their careers. McCarthy matured early. The First Convention (1978) and The Sorrow Garden (1981) displayed a rooted confidence both in his choice and in his handling of material. The themes introduced there - the tedium of small-town life in the De Valera years, the coarsening fibre of Fianna Fail as the party cheapened itself for the embrace of Haughey, the marginalisation of the "little people" who had helped it to power in the first place - were subjects never before treated in poetry and approached with an intimate authority by McCarthy.
A series of lyrics about the poet's shiftless, charming, uneducated but widely-read father and simpler, trusting mother worked at once as loving salutes to parents lost early and as elegies for a communal idyll corrupted by materialism. McCarthy's graceful combination of public and private concerns is one of the more secure achievements of recent southern poetry. In volumes such as The Non-Aligned Storyteller (1984) and Seven Winters in Paris (1989) he extended his range with unabashed celebrations of marriage and parenthood. At times his poems about domesticity and the joys of living in Cork can seem too determined to apprehend the miraculous in the everyday, too untroubled in their good cheer. Yet McCarthy can move from political and aesthetic naivete to potency at a stroke, as in "A July Afternoon on Jameson's Farm", a record of the mixture of sexual and social shame a young Catholic boy, doing holiday work on a neighbouring farm, feels in the presence of the Protestant owner's daughter: Once I was so amazed by her good looks/ that I fell headlong into a fruit-box,/ covering my face with brilliant juice;/my embarrassment as strong as hate -/ her eyes Elizabethan blue, amused.
This is well observed, and provides an example of the startling honesty which is one of this poet's key assets. Elsewhere, however, particularly in the new poems, McCarthy succumbs to an urge to bustle even the immediacies of the present into memory so that they can be done up in a warm glow, a sort of Munster version of English Heritage nostalgia. In constructing the galactic universe in subjective terms, even the strongest of the new poems, the exquisite `'Kate Inez, the Moon and Stars", indulges (albeit knowingly) a tendency towards wishful thinking. One cannot help feeling that it is time for McCarthy to move on to new territories, darker tonalities, and to be a little more selectively trustful of his instincts.
There is no lack of dark tonalities in Dennis O'Driscoll's new collection. Unlike McCarthy, O'Driscoll has had a long, slow ascent to poetic authority. Though (or because?) he is a gifted critic, his poems to date have been somewhat stilted, as if too obviously the products of a disciplined, austere intellect. Where McCarthy's lyrics have flourished in a wash of sense-impressions, O'Driscoll's have abstracted the general from the particulars of experience to the point where they have scarcely registered the weight of the world.
Even in Weather Permitting the more autobiographical poems seem plain and even halting beside McCarthy's. Other poems in the book, however, show O'Driscoll emerging as a philosophical poet, much concerned with mortality. In the beautifully modulated "Nocturne" and in the sequences "Interim Reports" and "Churchyard View: The New Estate", O'Driscoll writes with an urgency not found in his previous collections. These are at once deeply melancholy and lively poems, their new-found sense of the macabre issuing in a series of vivid and unsettling images: The child's coffin/ like a violin case./A pitch which parents' ears/ can hear through clay. By virtue of the sheer number of such moments in Weather Permitting, and of the remarkable stylistic economy which facilitates them, this book is news, a real breakthrough.
Patrick Crotty is a lecturer, critic and translator