The relations between poetry and history, between the personal space of the lyric and the painful facts of public event, have inevitably formed an exacerbating focus of attention in Irish writing of the past two-and-a-half decades. In these recent books from the Gallery Press, two major poets take up the strains of those relations in striking and suggestive ways which extend the range of possibilities offered within this fraught territory.

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin's The Brazen Serpent dramatizes moments in which the mystical, the unseen or the unheard press on the known and the mundane. But these are lyrics concerned also with the difficulties, the thinnings and emptyings-out involved with all processes of translation. The highly successful opening poem, “Fireman's Lift”, set the tone of the whole in recognizing the fact that ascension from one reality to another is always juddery and stalled. We watch as a picture of the Virgin is awkwardly raised into place high up in a cathedral: “The Virgin was spiralling to heaven, / Hauled up in stages.” Yet the poet is quick to discover the compensations, however transitory, to be derived from this struggle (“We saw the work entire, and how the light / Melted and faded”) and the human importance of it: “This is what love sees, that angle.”

Other poems in the collection pay similar subtle attention to the necessary hesitations in crediting the marvellous or strange. The very sketchiness of “A Note” makes the sudden awareness of the “dark presence / Of the wild boar” the more compelling; the sudden drift of white feathers which appears in a garden one morning, a blessing “with angeldown”, modulates into a banality again attentive to the unsaid as an old priest “had never been told my aunt's story / About all the trouble over building the party wall” (“The Party Wall”). What is urgent here is Ní Chuilleanáin's concern to link these stories told and untold to processes of history and specifically of women's history. In “The Real Thing”, “Sister Custos / Exposes her major relic”, a fragment of the Brazen Serpent which gives the collection its title. In Numbers 21, the brass serpent is made by Moses at God's suggestion as antidote to the plague of serpents which He has visited on the people of Israel. It is a story, then, which has resonance for the relation which poetry might make to troubled times. The poem's rewriting of this is, however, more hesitant and resistant to analogy. “Sister Custos's” winding, hanging relic is revealed only briefly before being locked up again, proving consonant with the obscurity of her own life: “Her history is a blank sheet” and her relic, although “the real thing”, is “the one free foot kicking / Under the white sheet of history”. …