New poetry: Rapture's Road; And Then the Hare; Landscape of the Body; All the Good Things You Deserve

• Published date: 05 May 2024
• Author: Martina Evans
• Publication title: Irish Times: Web Edition Articles (Dublin, Ireland)

Trance-like ecstatic language, "I saw//one man lift from the crotch/ of another, tasting fire .../ Terrible angel, come to me – " is counterpointed by the shockingly prosaic language used by the killers in We Didn't Mean To Kill Mr Flynn. "We'd battered twenty steamers that summer ..." Thomas Wyatt's poems are referenced directly in the poem Whoso List to Hunt but also indirectly in the overall hunting theme where terror is mingled with desire

Metamorphosis is the escape, flagged throughout by Hewitt's emblem moths fluttering, raising the question of mutability. Can we control it? "I have chosen one life, interred/ countless other selves." (Pleated Inkcaps). Yet the best lines emerge from a sense of powerlessness, in the haunting observation of Evening, With Ghost Moths, "each moth a door/ spinning open/then shut. What apertures//are these? Into which hole/in the night are they vanishing?/Little spectres – each body//a fitful apparition undoing its sign/ on the dark ..."

Nature signals Hewitt's ongoing grief, "my darting eyes –/waiting for you, father, to turn/your white side open, to show yourself –/" The finest poem is the shortest as Wyatt's landscape mimes Hewitt's fear of death, fear of ageing, reflecting back his deepest emotions in a haunting illustration of Eliot's objective correlative: "By my age, the snows of my father's/ life were already half-fallen./What is that sound? The white hart//leaping through its dark estate./ Frost on the eyes of the animals./ Frost in the mouths of the trees –" (Snows)

Michelle O'Sullivan's And Then the Hare (Gallery, €12.95) opens with a precise, tangible image. "It seems the first in weeks /– actual sunlight on the table, /a strip so wide you could/ warm your hands in it." (Welcome Stranger). The reader can't help but share in this "sudden glee that it's/you who comes to mind:/'Welcome, stranger, to this place/ where Joy doth sit on every bough.'"

The "you" is William Blake and it is a fitting evocation for a collection concerned with both the heavens and the earth. Blake's dualist spirit is a strong presence, "Venus changes from evening star to morning star/ and almost surpasses earth every 584 days./There is that realignment.//Of earth's sister or evil twin." (At the Surface). O'Sullivan's hopeful, watchful eye is a source of "Joy" as she looks down in Not Everything Violent Is Irreversible, summoning another Blakean image, the heavens reflected in the earth, "Thinking her dead I knelt where flag met grass...