Nessa O'Mahony: Trapping a Ghost (84pp pb £7.99. Isbn 1-904781-70-5)
Nigel Mcloughlin: Blood (87pp pb £7.99. Isbn 1-904781-49-7)

Nessa O'Mahony divides the poems in Trapping a Ghost into three sections: the title sequence, followed by 'The Writing Slope'—based on the journals and letters of her grandmother—and, finally, 'Travels and Translations' so-called for obvious reasons, supplemented by a few poems on personal break up. At her best she pins down an experience with a light, economical, sharply defined touch, (reminiscent of early Anna Akhmatova) combined with an understated bleakness that remains with you long after reading the poems. I wasn't particularly taken with the middle section, though, where personal letters to her grandmother are reconstructed in the text as poems.          

'Trapping a Ghost' explores half-suggested encounters with the afterlife. The sequence also touches on the illicit—a visitation from Beelzebub in the night or reading one's mother's letters on the sly (indirectly linking to the discovery of her grandmother's documents of the middle section).  Having recently visited Sylvia Plath's grave myself, I felt 'Visiting Sylvia' spot on in its description of the grave. After all the Plath/Hughes hype, the neatly kept grave is so pathetic and ordinary there in the old churchyard's overspill, with  'the jagged bed for early spring bulbs', and there is something infinitely sad in this suicide buried so far from home, captured well in O'Mahony's contemplation of the surrounding landscape:

My eyes keep straying to surrounding hills,
the snow's  retreat at boundary walls
as if heat of any sort were to be found there.

'York Child' which describes a small child's utter isolation imprisoned in York Minster is made all the more sinister by the quiet, restrained way the poem's carefully selected details, create mood and emotion from what is left unsaid, 'A child's face caught,/in the edge of shadow' and:

There's a weight against the door
she cannot hope to move.
she stares our at winter oaks
fretting the Minster.

The final lines powerfully convey the child's inability to develop withdrawn from all outside influence:

A puddle reflects
her face, reflects
the moon:
there's no difference.

O'Mahony  also includes a vivid series of family portraits. I could certainly relate to the portrait of her mother with her pleasurable absorption in death and mourning, captured humorously in 'Ceres returns for Cemetery Sunday' as she visits a graveyard, 'moving through grassy aisles/like a hostess at a garden party' and there is clear admiration for the slick way she deals with death as she tells stories to keep the dead alive:

You murmur glorious mysteries,
secure of your perch
at the edge of the underworld

And in a tribute to another relative in 'Eulogy' she similarly captures the older generation's sense of family, not necessarily valued by those that follow:

who when confined
charted her whole world
by the phone line,
keeping the rest of us in touch
whether we care to or not

The middle section is based on a fascinating find: letters and a journal revealing a story set at the time of the Irish Civil War to include illicit love, murder and final acceptance of a less passionate marriage. I think O'Mahony might have made a killing if she had used the material for a memoir. Yet where she slotted letters into the sequence, it is arguable as to whether they are actually poems at all. This said, in some of the sections, presumably triggered by her grandmother's journal, we again see her economical pinning down of a moment, such as her grandmother at the funeral of the man 'murdered' by her lover with all eyes on her as, 'the one who was walking out with Flood' :  

I just kept watching the flame,
the red glass flickering,
flickering to a heart-beat
as a woman wept.

We also see a sharp, dry tone and wordplay to describe these disapproving neighbours, 'Now they measure me up/as I cut their cloth'.  What also works well is changes in the grandmother's voice as she ages in the sequence along with the concrete detail to capture her older crustier character:

turning your cardiganed back
from prying eyes,
clutching the blankets
to your chin.

In the final section on travel and translation, the translations carry the day though I also liked how she suggested the mind-expanding power of travel:

When clay was everywhere I dusted myself off,
proud, sure that my habitat was liquid, air,
…floating clear and free of territory.

But I really loved her translations, both for the choice of subject matter—mainly Gaelic poems, which like her own poems have a simplicity and economy of carefully chosen details—,and for the seamless way they conceal the fact that they are translations. She also does a clever adaptation of a Pushkin poem (previously translated by various hands in MPT). By way of illustration I conclude with one of them—a poem by Máirtin Ó Dirain (1910-1988):

Spring in the West

A man scraping clay
off the edge of his spade
in the fragile quiet
of the midday heat:
   sweet the sound
   of spring in the west

A man throwing
a creel from his back
red seaweed
glistening
in the sunshine
on the white shingle beach:
   splendid the sight
   of spring in the west

Women in the rock pools
at low tide,
their frocks tucked up,
shadows beneath them:
    a sight to ease you,
    spring in the west.

Stiff-buttocked rowers
oars gently stroking,
the currach loaded
heading for shore
slowly over marigold neap tide
    at the end of the day
    spring in the west.

Nigel McLoughlin's Blood opens with two painfully personal poems dealing with his young child's illness and then moves to provide an ambitious collection based loosely on The Book of Invasions, the mLin source for early mythological histories of early Ireland. However, as he himself makes clear in an interview, he is concerned with loss, violence and invasion as it relates both to the situation in Northern Ireland and on a global scale since September 11th 2001. There are dangers in such ambitious aims, for, though we may all sympathise with the sentiment, no editor wants thousand of poems on September 11th , any more than they did on the death of Princess Diana. However, once one breaks through these predictable connections one can find what originality McLoughlin's has to offer: a fine eye for the landscape captured in a sinuous, harshly consonantal language, and an interpretation of that landscape driven by views on language, invasion and settlement very much his own. I also felt the collection would have been stronger if he had cut out the longer, prose-like poems, thus allowing the more densely associative language and imagery to stand out. As with O'Mahony, some of his material would have been better suited to more extended prose writing, beautiful as his prose certainly is—lines like, 'From shore we became transfigured/by the moon to back-lit gargoyles', or his microscopic portrayal of fire, 'a breathing ball that makes shards/of grey silk on the surface lit/like skin flayed from flesh and bone'.  All in all, in both the book's format and within individual poems I felt less would have been more.

The poems that worked well were those where he kept with the early mythological source material, honed down to a spare clear language. In 'Arrival', each stanza stands out sharply with a powerful, stark use of the senses, painted with broad brushstrokes—here the language has an Anglo Saxon force dominated largely by monosyllables:

A dark bulk of island rose out
of a black sea, defined itself,
rigid against the gun-metal dawn.

After an hour of hard rowing,
where the gale battered our backs
and the oars wracked and groaned

at the gunnels, our hull ground
against shingle and we beached her
up the slippage, drooped the stone

to weight her against the tide.
….
the dull thud of hammers
staking out our claim.

In places, one is simply struck by the precision of his descriptions, such as in 'Glencar' where 'the mist falls, like salt through water,/bemilking air', and those great concluding lines to show the land as ancient, 'unchanging/at the lambing of the world', or  'Estuary' with its neat metaphor that draws the reader in:

A marriage, where the stream
beds down with the sea
and both are neither.

In places there are also nods to both Hughes and Wordsworth. Like Hughes he conveys the innate violence of the natural world (independent of human conflict), here in 'Terzanelle for a Killing':

….
my tears rainbowed by the light.
I saw a hawk gyre around his game,
catch the air, stand at eye height.

Like Wordsworth in 'Inscape' the land is also there to be, 'recollected in tranquillity':

Where there is no fear
of dark, but the intimate
knowledge of everything
the darkness might contain

McLoughlin's voice becomes completely its own where he successfully merges all his key interests of land, history settlement, violence and perhaps most importantly language. 'Settlement' is the strongest section in the book. Here, the landscape provides continuity in the face of cyclical invasions, often expressed in a tight lyric form. The harsh language of 'Trees' conveys the violence it is forced to endure:

These are the lampions of the terrible fog:
generation upon generation hanging on—
the broken children of the rock.
Each egocentric root is fed on metal,
bred pig-iron hard through stock
and branch, bred pig ignorant of weather.

                        … Stunted runts that clawed
and stabbed and kept the invader out for centuries.
What rises in their sap? Long nights of lightning
that put fire in the wood and seasoned them.

There is one memorable poem after another in this section, providing various nuances on this ongoing theme: in 'Lightning' he states, 'This is a landscape bred to violence,/ hungry as the dog that's tasted blood' and 'Bridge of Tears' is moving in the way it draws attention to the inevitable emigration of the Irish Diaspora'. The most richly associative of all the poems in this section is 'Signals':

She carried beauty, as though it were
a gun, shot eyes all eider and ice.
She was a star I reached for in water,
an answer I looked for again and again
like a lighthouse sweeping a bay.
Somewhere the meanings all got lost
or melded into myth or Morse or hieroglyphs,
and the world forgot them.

And blind boats steer out past rocks,
the surf crashes and the wind sounds
like a low moan across the headland,
while I stand here on the shore, turning
again to hob-nail my way through all
the ploughed lands of language.
She dances the fallow field of my dreams.

The strong, opening simile is simple yet brutal in its associations. One is left with a sense that history hides its crimes and one must work through the layers to reach the Word; hence the cleverly clumsy image of 'hobnailing through the ploughed lands of language'. This poem's subtlety relies on a series of deftly extended metaphors, highlighting all the more what is absent in the more linear narrative poems.  

A final powerful poem from the last section is 'Amergin's Song'. Here the inseparability between language and invasion is explored further. The cycles of invasions and their concomitant cultures, paradoxically involves both repression of the old and absorption of the new, welcome or not:

And Amergin, shown everything
in an instant, sighs in a trance.
The ink of his mind opens, spills
to take wing from a cliff field;
to soar his words, wish them
to a high wind, where they scatter
to a different syntax.

Carried where the word carries
power of itself, driving
meaning to the stuttering
engine of the brain…

Thus, with McLoughlin's collection, I was left feeling that here is a collection of poems which are startling in places, but that the lyric voice would have been able to stand out more clearly if he were to winnow out the narrative poems which themselves would adapt well to a more sustained dramatized account of Ireland's early history. In such a case I am sure the text would receives accolades along the lines of, 'Mcloughlin's prose sparkles like poetry…' for poetry generally masquerades better as prose than prose does as poetry.

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copyright © Belinda Cooke, 2005. All quotations are copyright by the authors.