The Nightingale Water. By Macdara Woods. Dedalus. 92pp, £6.95
Knowledge in the Blood. New and Selected Poems. By Macdara Woods. Dedalus. 216pp, £7.95
Macdara WOODS has been an absorbing and relatively unplaceable presence in Irish writing since the 1970s, because the internationalising tendency of his poems to push the boundaries of Irish poetry outwards was always balanced by a rooted use of Irish language and tradition.
These two new books offer variations on this balance: Knowledge in the Blood adds nearly 50 pages of new poems to those available to the 1996 Selected, and is accompanied by the powerful new sequence, The Nightingale Water, which centres on the harrowing events surrounding the poet's mother's strokes and death.
One of Woods's most striking capacities has been to write the long poem, a form traditionally thought impossible in the modern age of confessional lyric. Reading these books together now, the most substantial earlier long poems, such as `Above Pesaro, June 1993', read like an apprenticeship that has reached mastery in The Nightingale Water.
The Irish poets that Woods might invite comparison with are Kennelly and Durcan, both of whom can play tunes of great force and precision on the slack string, as well as gaining highly emotional effects in an apparently artless conversational tone of voice. It is tempting to bring them together as a kind of Dublin country school, since they all return to the countryside of past experience (counties Kerry, Donegal and Meath) for material that puts in relief the metropolitan present of the speaking voice.
The Nightingale Water is arranged as a sequence of exchanges between the poet's first-person reflections, in a voice familiar from the earlier poetry, and the agitated voice of the dying woman, represented in italics. The title comes from one of her most haunting semi-delirious pleas:
what I would love
is water from the well
what I would love to have
is some of that nice
nightingale water
The poem goes on to comment grimly, "I write it down/as writers do", ending an exchange which has summarised beautifully the dilemma of the writer who publicises painful personal experience. A few pages earlier the poetic voice asked its dying interlocutor, "Will you/embarrass me today?" Since Keats, embarrassment is the risk confessional writers run, for their subjects as well as themselves.
Woods's poems have always been absorbing in their twists and turns. But this steadily pursued sequence seems much his strongest achievement to date. It builds on the striking shifts in the new poems at the end of Knowledge in the Blood, which mix a wonderfully clear portrayal of the eccentricity of the ordinary (the two `Street Scenes': `The Ranelagh Road' and `Neighbours') with a grave new power (in `Solstice' - "I brush ash and bone/into the path/push dust into the cracks") and an almost painfully evocative lyricism, in `Cladnageeragh' ("Wish the heron well for me").
Woods has always been interesting, and his heart has always been in the right place, even when it was on his sleeve; but these two new groups are disturbing in a different and more challenging idiom.
Bernard O'Donoghue teaches English at Wadham College Oxford and is the director of this year's Yeats Summer School in Sligo