Best Poetry Books 2001 selected by Pat Boran

POETRY BOOKS 2001

Sunday Tribune

Shortly after his appearance at the Dublin Writers Festival in June, Billy Collins became the new US Poet Laureate and had Dublin booksellers scrambling to locate copies of his Selected Poems, published in late 2000 and entitled Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes (Picador). Witty, playful lyrics, a terrific eye for the haunting image and a curiously unashamed attitude to poems about writing itself, Collins deserves mention in the best of 2001, if only because he was virtually unknown over here until this year.

Northwards up the coast in Canada, Anne Carson followed her Men in the Off Hours of last year with The Beauty of the Husband (Cape), more risky shape-changing and -challenging poems, bouncing off history and charged by quotation, but always remarkably, if sometimes frustratingly so, her own.

Across the Irish sea, the much-hyped new 'serious' book by Wendy Cope was something of a disappointment, as if love were in danger of smoothing out the feathers her army of readers delights in seeing ruffled. Still, there's enough fun and madness here ('Traditional Prize Country Pigs', 'The Ted Williams Villanelle') to earn the book space in many hearts.

Closer to home, the twin publishing events of 2001 were undoubtedly the appearance of collected volumes from both Thomas Kinsella (Carcanet) and the late Michael Hartnett (Gallery). Hartnett's endearing manner made him many friends over the years, but there's an altogether darker side to much of this beautiful work, and one hopes that the popularity of the man won't prevent the poems from being read closely.

Kinsella, in contrast, though sharing Hartnett's respect for the heritage of both languages and the importance of craft, is often seen as difficult or obscure, even by those with only a passing acquaintance. This would seem to have much to do with his typical avoidance of neat closure, with a sense of progress made by plan, and with individual poems that are ultimately interconnected, perhaps even interdependent. Kinsella's is a distinct, authoritative, critical voice, but while his body of work might by times appear fragmentary, even the fragments radiate.

It's indeed a strong year for Irish books when a new one from Seamus Heaney doesn't go straight to the top of the class. His by now much-reviewed and justly praised Electric Light (Faber) is a slow fuse of poetic consciousness and memory, a book that grows and will grow with repeated reading.

Eavan Boland's Code (Carcanet) is perhaps most remarkable for the title poem (in honour of the woman who helped compile the computer language COBOL), bringing one of Boland's passions, computers, into the reach of her other, and again seeing her explore the role of women in communication and the making of change.

Paul Durcan's Cries of an Irish Caveman (Harvill) looks like his finest book in years. All the fun that we forget we have no right to expect, combined, somehow, with the wonder and pain of recent love and loss. A kind of blessed lunacy visited on the quiet man next-door.

John Montague's Selected Poems represents the author's choice of his 1985 Collected Poems from Gallery, adding some recent poems including the wonderful The Family Piano, surely set to become a reading favourite.

Other notable appearances include Rita Ann Higgins' An Awful Racket (Bloodaxe), surely winner of the cheekiest poetry cover of recent years (not that there's been too much competition), and, in a very different vein, Danish poet Inger Christensen's Butterfly Valley (Dedalus), launched during the European Poetry Academy's visit to Dublin in April, a moving cycle of linked sonnets on the theme of death, rebirth and memory.

In light of the fact that the word itself is Greek for a collection of flowers, an anthology of verse about plants looks like a certain winner, especially when the editor is one-time gardener and impressive poet in her own right, Sarah Maguire. Flora Poetica (Chatto) is a fairly leisurely stroll through alphabetised species and sub-species, rather than through times and places, but planning or good luck could lead you down the garden path, out through Longley's Gorse Fires and Heaney's Whinlands to glimpse Wordsworth's and Herrick's daffodils and Louise Gluck's Wild Irish, then home the back road to find boys still swinging from Robert Frost's Birches, eighty-five winters on. A Christmas present waiting to be picked.

Finally, Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams (Gallery) is Dennis O'Driscoll's 360-page volume of selected prose on poetry matters. From overviews of the contemporary Irish scene, to close-ups of favourites such as Robert Hass, RS Thomas and Wislawa Szymborska, O'Driscoll brings meticulous research, wide reading and no little wit ('There ought to be a vodka called Szymborska') to a subject he makes his own.