Cry for the Hot Belly by Kerry Hardie. Gallery, £6.95 pb, £12.95 hb
Oar by Moya Cannon. Gallery, £6.95 pb, £12.95 hb
Kerry Hardie's second collection tracks along the same brave paths found in A Furious Place, moving out from illness to search for a palliative grace in the natural environment. Her "small strong vision snarled on a net of fields" uncovers a new vocabulary for pastoral verse that continually surprises with its precision, as in this description of a flock of lapwings:
`Then just before Carlow, a field got up and took to the air: white-bellied birds, their dark, splayed wings flopping up into the sky.' ("Signals")
Irish poetry is crowded with amateur naturalists, and Hardie does share with Michael Longley an impulse to school the casual observer in "wild flowers: their legends, properties, names" ("Things that are Lost"). Her great asset is that this desire to list phenomena is resisted in the main, allowing her a greater emotional freedom in her use of the pastoral tradition: the same poem closes with the instructions: "Lose things, forget them, let them go. / See all things always the first time / Unnamed. In wonder. "
The loosely calendrical structure of the volume helps bear out this credo of "making new". This is an elegiac cycle and Hardie's finest poems are her springtime reflections on the hardships of the preceding winter. She is confident enough in her control of imagery to write about her own physical struggles without a hint of self-pity: a streaming boreen offers a place to sit, rest and view the world, "from down where the hare sees", during a taxing walk around a headland ("She Replies to Carmel's Letter"). What would for lesser poets be enough of an experience in itself, is turned into a consoling thought for her sick friend:
"So now, when you write that you labour to strip off the layers,
and there might not, under them, be anything at all,
I remember that time, and I wish you had sat there, with me,
your skin fever-hot, the lovely wet coldness of winter mud
on your red, uncovered hands, knowing it's all in the layers,
the flesh on the bones, the patterns that the bones push
upwards onto the flesh."
Technically, this stanzaically arranged, unrhymed, free verse may not seem ambitious, but that would be to overlook the dexterity with which Hardie handles her imagery. "Vitality" is, to my mind, the most accomplished poem here, as it plays simple tricks with the theme of metamorphosis to turn a recuperative swim in a friend's pool into a startling image of loneliness and disease. "Exiles " is the most ambitious, a long elegy, which needs a little too much concentration to work out who is referred to by each pronoun. Yet this is a minor complaint in the face of a volume of such redemptive power.
Nature in Moya Cannon's Oar is altogether a place of greater archaeological significance. Gallery has just re-issued this revised first collection, published by Salmon in 1990, a sort of prequel to The Parchment Boat. The landscapes of Galway, Donegal and Antrim exist as both the territories of primal forces, and the heart-lands of a folkish Catholicism. This materialist was unsatisfied with some of her images which lead to confusion: "the clam's breathing deep in wet sand gave a mark to the spade." ("Foundations")
Perhaps this exemplifies the central theme of the volume, the inability to speak of this elemental history in a language true to its mystery.
Selina Guinness is a lecturer in Irish Literature at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology