In Robert Welch's second collection of poetry, Secret Societies (Dedalus, £9.95/£5.95), divided into five distinct sections, the poems tend to investigate the possibilities of memory and imagination. A poem entitled "Haydn, Hopkins, Bird" ("A solemn face, at a window in Dublin/a Roman collar, a neat soutane./Deferring to necessity, he was beginning to know/there was no avoidance of verbs,") plays in neat harmony with "A Text from the Metrical Dindshenchus" ("Ways totally obscure,/fighting at every village,/dark holes by he roadside,/wild men raging,/this was what it was like/on the road to Dunseverick.") - memory and poetic imagination as another text of history.
Welch's sense of just how much is owed to the creative process by the traditional work of singing, for example, is acknowledge in "Switch Gear", a poem whose epigraph recalls the singing of Sean O Flaithearta: "For Caitlin Made, Dead Fifteen years" pays more direct homage in a marvellous two-verse poem to the poet and singer: A black bird turning aroundwith its one good wing, driving itself into the pain of that other, shattered one.
There's a fair balance of humour here, too. "3 Easy Lessons in Destroying a Sect" opens with a prose stanza: "Find a sincere poet and swear him to secrecy. Tell him all you know of the rituals, and be sure he'll convert them into entertainment." "The Laws of England", a somewhat weightier poem, carries an epigraphic quote from Edward Coke, speaking in favour of those same laws against the sovereignty claimed by James I, and remarks: You stand, now, in your fiery power; all still are awed by that dimensionof your excellence. Now we turn to you so that the given path-ways menhave broken through are kept clear.
At this point I might declare an interest. Salmon Poetry published my own collection, True North, earlier this year. Ben Howard's saga-like Midcentury (Salmon, £5.95) divides itself into six sections and in the main concerns a fictional inspection, through the eyes of an American seeking solace in the Ireland of the forties, of various aspects of Irish history and culture. Howard has drawn on many published sources here, such as Anthony Cronin's Dead as Doornails and Terence Brown's Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922-1985. The result is a sort of verse-novel, which here and there feels the weight of its references, but succeeds nonetheless. "Across the water it was called the war./But here in Ireland, where parachutes/Redeemed from wreckages were resurrected/As silken blouses, silken shirts and scarves,/The Irish called it the Emergency."
Ben Howard teaches literature and classical guitar at Alfred University, New York, and his previous publications include a series of essays on modern Irish writing and three collections of poems.
Dublin-born Jean O'Brien has published and broadcast her work widely. A quietly lyrical note sounds through most of the poems in The Shadow Keeper (Salmon, £5.99), and her concerns are for the most part comfortingly familiar and domestic. Poems such as "The Shadow Keeper" ("He smiles up at me/with my own eyes") and "Wild Weeds" ("Wild weeds scatter my garden,/I reap and sow and tidy up") set the overall tone. The simplicity of some of these poems masks a real poetic power, evident in a poem such as "Census": I have no furniture to speak of just one copper pot given on marriage by my mother tied now with twine about my waist, echoing like a bell in empty space.