Snatching at cupfuls of autumn

How far it is across the bay depends on light and weather. On a fresh-washed, westerly morning, a dolphin might do it in 15 minutes, taking a bearing on the Tully supermarket or the glinting dormers of Renvyle House Hotel. In an easterly gloom, with Tully Mountain all the one grey in my window, it looks every mile of the hour it takes to drive up one side of Killary fiord and down the other.

Almost 40 years ago, fresh to Ireland, I lived for a year below Tully - sharing, without knowing it, a cultural postcript of fresh-churned butter, beestings and carrageen, poitin and sea-rods. Even as all the new bungalows underscore the mountain in Weathershield white, it is that vanished weave of Connemara that patterns the air between me and the far peninsula.

Somewhere over there also, rooted in fuchsia above the lake, is a poet's shieling, betrayed by turf-smoke and a jet's contrail that tracks him all the way across the ocean to the day job, teaching in Vassar College, Poughkeepsie. Eamon Grennan, first a Dubliner, is now as much at home in the New Yorker as The Irish Times, nourishing one with Connemara's drifting cows and herons and the other with the hectic palette of New England's fall.

There's a fine continuum of landscape in his Selected and New Poems (Gallery Press, £8.95), so that one reaches at times for clues in the names of things: if it's maple and deer, we're in Robert Frost country. At others, what's going on is too stirring or tender to pause for place; the poems lift and carry you, like waves (to quote is to snatch at cupfuls).

So much has changed below Tully in 40 years, yet what a poet lights upon are still the things in nature's keeping or, if part of man's, then worn to the core. On both sides of the bay, the poet and I know about driftwood fence-posts at the shore ("for all their varicose veins and dried grain lines/ these old-timers know how to stand up/to whatever weather swaggers off the Atlantic"). I mean to show him, at the first fence on our dunes, the way snails line up for winter in crevices at the tops of the posts, on the lee side, there to ride out storms with the sand-grains pecking the gloss off their shells.

We both picked mussels in the creek at Derryinver, I for free food in a penny-pinching winter, he in lyrical communion with his daughter, gathering for a family feast ("remembering/the way the way the sun went down behind the two of us/as we gathered dinner, as if our lives/were always together and this simple . . ."). There were always, will always be, two white horses in a field up the road, "still as creatures carved in quartz" until one's tread behind the fuchsia hedge spooks them into a gallop.

Ants have always been a great test of worth in a poet, a sure litmus for the pompous parable. Eamon Grennan, watching a black ant hauling a faded moth across pebbles and under grass-blades, can marvel at its "gimlet will" without feeling the need to point any moral for ourselves: "Frantic with invention, it is a seething gene/of stubborn order, its code containing no surrender/only this solitary working frenzy that's got you/ on your knees with wonder . . ."

Sometimes, walking the tide-line after a storm, I begin to feel like a mortician, so close is my attendance at the corpses of withered birds and punctured dolphins. Across the bay, the poet's meditations on the dead extend his intense observation (the pads of a drowned dog "are buttons of bleached wood/in a ring of stubble") into the world that closes to fill the space.

This is the time of year when poets (and the rest of us) find a badger dead on the road and want (some of us, anyway) to stop, perhaps to brush that feathery softness of the guard-hairs across the back of one's fingers. Grennan's badger, his first, was "a solid black and white case of absence" on a side-road near Sligo; a curl of blood between bared teeth rhyming with the juice of lovers' blackberries.

His poem sent me to Michael Longley's Mayo requiem ("Backing into the dark we floodlit each hair/Like a filament of light our lights had put out") and to Seamus Heaney's eerie and exact "unquestionable houseboy's shoulders/that could have been my own".

On this side of the bay, Michael Longley is, of course, the landscape's devoted laureate, and from his new collection The Weather in Japan (Cape, £8 in UK), which has won the prestigious Hawthornden Prize, I can paste in another precious half-dozen scenes.

Our shared recognitions seem increasingly to need fewer and fewer lines, like haiku and carved netsuke, and even the words that offer his title seem to catch a lot of Mayo in one drop: "The weather in Japan/Makes bead curtains of the rain,/Of the mist a paper screen."

Here's more death, too, but in a different key. The fox we passed, caught by a flood in the mountain river and ending feet-to-the-sky in the fence beside the ford: "A fox who tries to sidestep death, decay/And barbed wire by fox-trotting upside down/Against the camber of the Milky Way."

Sometimes it seems that footprints along the tide, just ahead of mine, must be his, or that, coming after me, he times it right to see the otter hanging in the comber as it curls, or a shooting star doused in the lake between the whooper swans.

Such images are Romantic with a big R, but a whole world of intellect and sensibility separates poets such as Longley, Heaney, Grennan and Liam Lysaght from the glib "nature poetry" of the past. Respect for natural history sharpens both understanding and vocabulary (Longley's "I forgot the pale butterwort there on the ground/Spreading its leaves like starfish and digesting/Insects that squirm on each adhesive tongue . . .").

Anthropomorphism of the old sort is definitely out, but Longley, in his latest poems, has coloured for ever my enjoyment of this shoreline's most buoyant crows. Watching the choughs rolling and soaring at the cliff, cupping their red claws beneath them, he recalls his father telling him how raw recruits in the first World War would clutch their "courting tackle" under heavy fire: "Choughs at play are the souls of young soldiers/Lifting their testicles into the sky."