Stagnant maze of interior

`I come home these nights under such light, alleys of softly glowing elder in whose flower the bridal whites discolour, the freshness of spring sours into summer."

By now, in the warren of back roads around Piltown in County Kilkenny, where poet Mark Roper has his Heron Cottage, the elder trees will have lost their "discs of clotted chalky light" and retreated into the general green gloom of an Irish July. How I dislike this month, with its blighty drizzles and sweat-flies, its sullen mountains, its tasteless sprawl of leaves!

But if I moan about it ritually each year in Thallabawn, where at least a new ocean arrives to wash the rocks twice a day, how much more would I suffer the month in the stagnant maze of the interior. "For weeks we've watched smudged fields/ weighed down by mean July. We've heard them broadcast/ brightness and woken to wet weather." That's farmer-poet-publisher Peter Fallon waiting to mow his meadow at Loughcrew in County Meath.

And yet, both poets show deep care and satisfaction for where they are. Roper is an incomer, well-settled, and The Home Fire of his new poems (Abbey Press, £4.00) warmed a Derbyshire childhood. Now he explores nature for its metaphors. Watching heifers at a pond at dusk, swishing their tails as insects whirr around their heads and shifting feet, he finds that "no one knows where cattle end or begin".

Peter Fallon's cattle are firmly mired in mud: "They worship at an altar/ of a trailer with the tailboard off,/ up to their knees in a muck moraine./ They swish the thuribles of their tails, slap/ incense breath on the silage psalter,/ grain, turn cud; a smothered cough." His sheep, too, are real: "They'll go where you don't want/ And won't where you do."

News of the World (Gallery Books, £7.95), a substantial selection from Fallon's poems, shows him at home in a Meath of summer nettles and thistles and sycamore-shadows, a whole rural world away from stud-farm parkland or big-house beeches ("When the sergeant called about the ragwort/ he'd the feet up on a sunny day . . .").

These are the insights of an insider, born to the midland county, tuned to its idioms, privy to the gossip that decodes dark or strange events. There are dumped babies here, and fraught lives of the sort Patrick Kavanagh knew in Monaghan and Robert Frost in New Hampshire. Fallon relates them tellingly, but without any show of rancour or, worse, of folksy shrewdness.

He feels no need to defend himself (yet does) against the reproach of an over-ready contentment. Unhappy friends in the city are chided for their own passivity and reluctance to make choices: "They wait/ for things to change, as if history/ happens to others, elsewhere. They hibernate/ in dreams and fear . . . All I approve persists,/ is here, at home. I think it exquisite/ to stand in the yard, my feet on the ground,/ in cowshit and horseshit and sheepshit."

This, mind you, in a poem called Winter Work! Now, at the opposite season, it is hard to conjure how severe a place the midlands can be, when the temperature in Birr is three below, and "Along the road/ gale forces bend and burst/ the sails of ivy in the masts of ash."

Who would have thought that the midland frosts were harsh enough to wither conifers? Yet recently, following a trail across cutaway bog to the fossil beach of Lough Boora, in Co Offaly, I found myself walking through a strange wood of Sitka spruce - part of a trial plantation on Bord na Mona's abandoned tundra.

Not alone are the trees growing poorly and failing to take up their nutrients; many have been shaped into a fantastic topiary, like ranks of fuzzy totem poles. This is the work of late spring frosts, withering the spruce buds as they open in early May.

The Sitka failure is an initial set-back to plans for forestry as the major use for the cutaway peat, and Bord na Mona and Coillte have turned to FERG, the Forest Ecosystem Research Group at UCD, led by Professor Ted Farrell. This group has already been working on the chemistry of rainfall and soil in our forests. Now it is asked to work out ways of predicting where frosts will strike, and to find a range of tree species which would take low temperatures in their stride.

This is a 10 or 15-year assignment. Meanwhile, the cutaway is making its own choices of tree in the self-sown woods springing up on the peat in the Lough Boora Parklands. Birch, predictably, is a vigorous coloniser, just as it was in the wake of the last Ice Age. Scots pine, too, is arriving out of the air, just as it did when the bogs dried out in a climate swing 4,000 years ago.

I'd be surprised not to find both birch and Scots pine in FERG's tree trials. Coillte already has a whole seed orchard of Scots pine, trying to find the strains that will grow fast and straight in plantations.

Unless some genetically-engineered, frost-proof, industrial superclone of a spruce tree emerges from somewhere (which is not at all improbable), the 21st century forests on the 50,000 hectares of midland cutaway are likely to be a mosaic of species. Their plantations will interweave with grassland and angling lakes and with a network of true wilderness on unproductive land in which even the white-fronted geese will feel at home.

Last year, the first big conference on the future use of cutaway bogs was held in Offaly and its proceedings have just been published by Bord na Mona at £10. "It matters," says John Feehan, presenting his scenario for wilderness, "that the midlands should be as rich a place to live in the next century as we can bring about in our time."