NOELLE VIAL's first poetry collection, Promiscuous Winds (Story Line Press £8 in UK) is definitely a between-the-sheets book. Its five parts, each of which appears initially to have a different flavour, all merge eventually to address a single theme: the used, submissive, but increasingly angry woman who, in "After Love", is "still warm, like a bird found dead on the pavement". After a string of poems on this theme in the first section - man as beast, overbearing breadwinner "bricking me into my kitchen" - Promiscuous Winds began to seem very much a one-stringed violin, their titles too weighty for their flimsy content, the use of direct speech confusing and fragmentary.
But as the scene shifts to the mother, and back to the daughter as a woman rejecting the easy comfort of femininity, I began reluctantly to admire her struggle to maintain a sense of self, her hunger for the "scent to track a woman down." In spite of the unsatisfying gaps in her stories and the infrequency of moments that stand out - such as when a stranger taps her on the shoulder and informs her "Excuse me, but I think you're wearing/Yourself inside out" - she is searingly honest, rigorous in her fight against the submergence of self and the men who try to "build" women, and her search for "the crooked line of truth".
Unfortunately, too many of her lines are too straight. There is very little to spark interest in most of the poems, little to chew on. Poems like "Another Life" really need something to anchor them, and although I like the flashes I see of her true style, the final impression of Promiscuous Winds is of a uniform grey sea, moving slowly, with few distinct or lasting flashes of light coming off the water.
On the other hand, Sunny Side Plucked (Bloodaxe, £8.95 in UK), Rita Ann Higgins's New and Selected Poems, is a river of stories and portraits. From the outset, with its cheerful dedication to her twelve siblings, there is a sense of plenty to go round. It is the best of times and it is the worst of times in Higgins's poetry. She is a town-crier of modern hardship: the urban scourges of drink, unemployment, the breadline, and life on the hire purchase system loom large in the poems, which are also lit up by the funny, affectionate moments in life, and by her odd, secret way of seeing.
Higgins offers gems of the truly bizarre: the butcher who wants to shout "Lapis Lazuli Lapis Lazuli", but says something banal instead; the witch in herself who wants to scramble an American man's eggs. The book is a slice of life, full of the kinds of things people are always saying and doing, which she gets so right. There is so much direct speech it's like an anthropologist's treasure chest; here, in these pages, is how Irish people spoke in the 1990s.
Some of the poems are too raw, and some don't live up to the single good idea of the title (such as "I Want to Sleep with Kim Basinger"). But her lovely, quick insights into the human heart - a man saying to his wife as they make love "Gloria love, Gloria/ let on I'm tall" - and her unhesitating, funny, gritty exposition of the viscera of life more than make up for the few weeds that should have been pulled. Higgins, in her own words, is "cross-legged on a lonely molar", and I salute her with delight.