Poetry: These new books by two of the leading Irish women poets of the 1990s, Mary O'Malley and Katie Donovan come from opposite ends of the spectrum in several ways - thereby of course illustrating the versatility of that poetic world, writes Bernard O'Donoghue.
The Boning Hall. By Mary O' Malley. Carcanet, 116pp. £6.95
Day of the Dead. By Katie Donovan. Bloodaxe, 80pp. £7.95
Not that there is a reserved field of "women's poetry"; it would be more accurate to say that between them they are exemplary of the two worlds to which poetry itself applies - the private and the public.
Donovan is a highly idiosyncratic, individualistic writer who probes experiences for hidden meanings; O'Malley has always been a poet of great social awareness, often expressed by a cold fury, combined with an unmistakable personal passion. Again, it is more complicated than this suggests; O'Malley's public poems are often expressed in abstract terms while Donovan's seeming introversion is expressed through a poetry of great solidity and tactility. Both are at their very best in these new books.
In O'Malley's case, the book is not entirely new. It is her first volume from Carcanet, prefacing selections from her three acclaimed Salmon books from the 1990s with 50 new poems. The order works well, giving due urgency to the new poems: in the earlier poems her native Irish often seems close to the textual surface, as in the riddling (and Ní Dhomhnaill-recalling) double-entendres of 'Canvas Currach':
I have no sail to wear but my black dress
clings to my ribs, seamless.
I am a slim greyhound of the sea.
The deeper your oars dig in
the lighter I skim.
I am built to run. Race me!
There is plenty of this kind of twinkling-eyed wit in The Boning Hall's new poems. But what is most impressive is the further development of the committed seriousness which was already striking in Asylum Road (Salmon, 2001). The overall impression the new book gives is of a libidinous and humorous writer who would like to stick to the domestic and the sensual but finds such withdrawals inadequate in the face of public responsibility. Hence the raw Bloody Sunday poem, 'My role was that of an observer', which scrupulously resists the temptation to poeticise, and 'Divorce Referendum', which elegantly represents the way public issues are versions of private dilemmas - of "couples . . . preparing for eviction/deciding who is the landlord of their love,/who the croppy". O'Malley is an important voice and conscience for the times.
Katie Donovan covers a remarkable range in Day of the Dead, extending from the powerful elegies and international death-rituals of the opening poems to smart human parables in poems such as 'The Visit', in which the surgeon's visit to the anaesthetised woman is imaged as a sexual approach to the sleeping lover. There is a lot of sex here, handled with brio and wit; if Germaine Greer is still wondering 'What Men Are For', she need look no further than the manual provided by the poem of that title here.
As with all poets who have a gift for imagery, Donovan is at her best with the concrete instance, as in 'The Bed':
I twist out
the long screws
that bolt the frame together.
The bed falls apart -
a loose rack of bones.
Most of the poems are sexual twosomes; what gives them distinction is not their endlessly cosmopolitan holiday settings (which could become wearying - though that may be envy) but Donovan's exceptional descriptive gift, at its most rewarding when she hits on the perfect meaning for her image, as in 'Coral':
its harsh pores - that sing
when your fingers lightly play -
suggest the hidden thing in me
that will not bend,
that cuts you
if you press too close,
and, if it's rattled,
breaks in jagged brittles,
waiting to needle you
in the dark.
Bernard O'Donoghue's next book of poems, Outliving, will be published by Chatto and Windus in the spring