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These are representative collections by poets close in age to Heaney who have written with comparable seriousness and, in Constantine's case, published with similar frequency. They allow provisional estimates of two substantial writing careers.

   David Constantine's Collected is not complete, comprising the poems from his seven previous Bloodaxe collections which he wishes to keep in print together with the poems in two limited editions and some new poems. Reading the 350 pages, I am struck, first, by how few poems deal centrally with other people, that is people in the present world, not in myth or history, who are determinably separate from the poet. A series of early poems describes people and their ends with decided lack of sympathy: Milburn Margaret Mrs who

            on a Friday in the public view
      Lodged on the weir as logs do.
                        (But with a history of ECT)

And Dennis Jubb who

               lived to be forty, a good age,
      And got his death by burning on the front page.
                       (Dennis Jubb is Dead)

Mr Jubb has "a loving mate / and a revitalised house on the Fairhope Road Estate". There is a Fairhope Avenue in Salford where Constantine was born and brought up. The estate recurs in Misshapen Women which is worth quoting in full:

  Misshapen women on the Fairhope Road Estate when the wind
     Presses on you hurrying to the meat factory
  Your breasts are not discovered through a thin chiton, nor down
     The inguinal triangle do the lovely folds ripple;
  And when the sun, winking behind the scrapheap, ends your days
     You cannot face it smiling like caryatids,
  Whom only marble burdened, for you are not fit to be
     Regarded from any angle. Only from above,
  To Infinite Mercy, are your unbuttonable forms and your
     Poor mouths not an eyesore, and in an interlude
  When no sun plays and no sarcastic wind He may drizzle
     Some charity upon you from a grey heaven.

   I can find no post-modernist irony here. The poem expresses contempt for working women, chiefly because of their sexual unattractiveness. Oddly, it has the same quality of sneering patronage that John Berger exposed in early commentators on the work of another Salford artist, L S Lowry. (A Lowry painting is reproduced on the book's cover but, as almost none of Constantine's poems are set in towns, it is the atypical House on the Moor.) While Lowry stayed and painted what he saw, Misshapen women expresses the Oxford graduate's discomfort with the working class among whom he grew up. This discomfort appears in later poems such as The Pitman's Garden where Constantine adopts a truncated demotic that he uses nowhere else:

      Man called Teddy had a garden in
      The ruins of Mary Magdalen
      By Baxter's Scrap. Grew leeks. What leeks need is
      Plenty of shite and sunshine...

   Quay is a lengthy account of working class holidaymakers torturing and killing a crab and, most tellingly, a recent poem, Photo, explains that the poet's uncle should not have been photographed against the Alps. Unlike his nephew who enjoys mountains, Uncle Norman

           was all right in some little habitation
      Among the back streets dwarfed
      Only by gasometers and All Saints Church...

Note the contempt in "some".

   As for individuals, so for people in the mass. Although he has written powerfully about the political role of poetry, Constantine's own poems show no interest in it. Apart from splendid mockery of American fundamentalism in Body Parts and the Rapture, only two poems deal overtly with political themes, both negatively: Jazz on Charles Bridge which responds to the Czech revolution with weary scepticism:

      All is well now, all is forgiven, the Real
      Republic is here, the best we'll ever get
      And good, so good, such courtesy
      The way they let one another through in turn...

and Pictures in which a decision to replace "the Kissing Swallows / And the Modigliani nude" with one or more of the emblematic 20th century images of atrocity ("a child, / Say, on fire and running  towards us / Down a long road") is not taken. A tendency to reduce human atrocity to mere image appears in Mother and Daughter and The quick and the dead at Pompeii where the engulfment of Pompeii is compared in single lines with the firebombing of Dresden and with Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and in Lamb where hooded crows "are as inclined to mercy as a Kray or a Mengele" and the sky is "like Cambodia's / Entrails in the jaws of Pol Pot". This use of imagery indicates both a straining for effect and a lack of moral discrimination. If a crow is indistinguishable from Mengele or a threatening sky from Pol Pot, violence is as natural among people, and as little worthy of comment, as violence in nature.

   It is here that the doubts that critics have expressed about Constantine's poetry begin to surface, as in Elizabeth Lowry's comment that "the beatific, the ordinary, the rebarbative even, are almost indistinguishable" and Sean O'Brien's that "its colours and joys and terrors are heightened as though by fever". Lamb well exemplifies the unease that Constantine's work provokes. It is a meditation on the birth of a lamb in a clifftop field, but the jaunty dated colloquialism of the beginning and end ("Hats off to the little chap"), the gross realism of the birth ("Eased out like a stool the colour of blood and mustard"), the increasingly strained imagery of terror, the bizarre belief that less educated people are less sensitive:

      Even a field like this and the corbies treading and tearing 
                                               at the slung-around placentas
      Perhaps it only upsets you if you have an education...

- all this indicates, not a focus on the lamb in itself or as an emblem of suffering, but a display of feeling that is scarcely coherent because scarcely related to the real world.

   In fact, Constantine's most characteristic poems make no attempt to inhabit the world of actuality. Rather they operate symbolically and usually describe aspects of a relationship, more specifically a conflict, with an unidentified other. The relationship is often sexual, containing elements of violence, and the action is dreamlike whether explicitly so or not. When ascertainable, the setting is elemental - mountain, river valley, sea - as is the characteristic imagery: sky, light, dark, sun, moon, wind, water in its many forms, trees, apples, frost.

   These poems have a sustained brilliance, a cumulative flow of statement and image both exalted and exultant, that carries all before it. They are central to Constantine's work and appear at all stages of it. They show no development of style, as if they sprang directly from Constantine's psyche without mediation by the conscious mind. Examples are Love of the Dark, Sunset Shells, Mynydd Mawr, Sleep With, Man and Wife, Water, More like today, Orangery, On Conwy Mountain and Cave Dale. Typically these poems run to considerable length and need lengthy quotation to demonstrate their qualities. Occasionally Constantine writes more briefly in the same vein, as in The Mirror which is given in full:

      Mirror, the window set
      On a sharp starlight and a moon ascending
      Flat, like a shark. Out of her clothes

      Membra disjecta on their battleground,
      All the warmth has gone. He puts his hopes
      In cold, expends

      His wishes on her glass. Remembering
      The silk slide from her shoulders as quickly as memory
      He knows his heart must fall a floor like a lift
      And in that loss of heat she will precipitate
      As white as flour. The shock,
      The sigh, as though his eyes,

      Hard on her fingertips, were being put out.

   This has the elegance and slightly puzzling quality of a painting by Chirico or Delvaux - the scene set coldly and flatly, female nudity observed from a distance, emotional coldness suffused with ruefulness, a hint of terrible violence - and one remembers Constantine's life-long professional interest in European, specifically German, literature. In this context it might seem that Constantine is an expressionist, but German expressionist writers, and their visual counterparts such as Alfred Kubin and Max Klinger, typically seek to evoke strong emotion directly, however symbolic their means.

   It is important to be clear what Constantine is doing in poems like these, which are central to his achievement. He has been described as a mythopoeic poet and he himself has described the best poems as "found", that "the poem is already there and waits discovery or recovery by the act of fitting words together". However, at his best he does not call on existing myths to express his meaning. Rather, he strives again and again to express his internal dramas through original simile, metaphor and symbol. The effect is daring, fresh and, like the surrealists in outcome if not intention, exclusionary. The poems make no claim to shared experience with the reader. If the reader does not happen to have shared Constantine's particular drama, the poem remains distant and unengaging.

Problems arise when Constantine tries to apply a mythopoeic approach to events in the real world. Lacking the self-mythologising resources of his internal dramas, he falls back on established myths with unconvincing results. The Hoist shows him casting around for a myth to give significance to a hospital scene of an old man being hoisted out of bed into a wheelchair:

      And I thought of an old mad king still gripping
      Tatters of divinity around his shoulders
      Or one in a tumbril and the old folk crossing themselves
      Or a pharoah, or a lost god, when the Nurse said
      Going down, and settled him in the chair and wheeled him off.

   This doesn't try to express the poet's feelings about the experience; it merely lists comparisons of a strained and implausible kind. It is as if (as with his Uncle Norman) Constantine cannot actually feel for an old man in a hospital bed and so takes refuge in received imagery.

   In Apples the poet's experience of catching apples thrown from from a tree by his son and daughter is tricked out with references to Mr McGregor from The Magic Roundabout, God the Father, the Green Man, Lob, Eve and the Virgin Mary. It also includes a fantasy of the poet touching his young daughter's breasts and her "core".

   This mythologising tendency is shown at its most bizarre in a series of poems about the London Underground. In Forest the poet falls asleep "very tight" on the Central Line going east from Bethnal Green. At Leytonstone a naked man with a donkey's head gets on and sits "twiddling his ticket". (The Central Line runs through the remnants of Epping Forest, hence the poem's title and the modern Bottom.) A girl gets on and sits with the donkey man. They get off together amid "scents...Music, a river noise" and head for the forest while the poet curses the "damned train" and the "knotted heart" of the city.

   In the next poem, a girl stares at the people in her carriage hungrily and embarrassingly, as if they are beautiful. She is, of course, Miranda on the Tube. In Musicians in the Underground:

            That girl
      Who stood in the rush hour at the mouth of one of the chambers
      And showed ten thousand people the countenance of an angel
      with closed eyes, singing. It was something
      Not in our daily speech but still our language
      Older, truer. Then how wrong
      And slovenly my tongue felt. They visit the body and soul
      Of every love and want and the night's lost dreams
      They fetch them home...

   This is striking in that it attempts a transformation of a common sight, the underground busker, into an angel singing a truer language than we are capable of. Does it succeed? My feeling is that it doesn't, partly because the language has a hasty, short-breathed quality which does not establish how the busker's song is "older, truer" and drifts off into high-sounding vagueness in the last three lines, and partly from sentimentality - middle-aged men are liable to describe pretty young women as angels. The same process appears in Before the Lidding, one of several later poems about funerals. The sombre description of gathering round the coffin (there is scant reference to the dead person and none to the poet's feelings about him or her) is transformed by the arrival of a young woman through the rain:

                      shaking out her hair
      In came a girl who shone from the hard sleet
      And looked with candour fearlessly...

   The description of the girl occupies the last third of the poem and has exactly the tone of Solness's description of Hilda Wangel's arrival in The Master Builder.

   Constantine's Collected Poems has a significant number of poems overwritten to an embarrassing degree: Poppies where "the petals unclenching / Are harder on the cap than is a baby’s head / On the tight vagina" (how does he know?); Cycladic Idols which includes "Your eyes are incorrigible / As though a nipple in each would cool your migraine"; Skylight over the Bath with its forced reference to Star Trek; the grotesque first poem of A Poetry Primer which compares a poem at length to the clitoris.

  On the other hand, there are two fine and much anthologised poems on humankind's longing for epiphany in nature (Watching for Dolphins and Endangered Species) and several poems with an engaging sense of humour: A Relief of Pan, A two-seater privy over a stream, Comfort me with Apples and, as mentioned previously, Body Parts and the Rapture. But these are peripheral to Constantine's oeuvre. It is clear that he does not write in the humanist tradition which sees humankind as the measure of all things and pursues the examined moral life. And yet in his critical writings Constantine often makes exactly this claim: "Poetry helps us understand common things better... Poetry will not teach us to live well, but it will incite in us the wish to." In his essay in Magma 29, What good does it do?, Constantine writes movingly and at length
about the social power of poetry:

      Reading poetry is mostly solitary, its effect is
      communal. It connects the reader across gender,
      race, culture, time and space with other possible
      ways of being human... I don't say the connectedness
      of the poem, and the feeling of connectedness
      engendered by the poem in its reader, are
      immediately transferable to social living. Of course
      not. But they make a potent analogy, and the mind of
      the citizen needs good analogies, better ideas for
      social life, so that the discrepancy between the way
      we live and the way we might live will always be
      apparent and undeniable.

   Here as elsewhere Constantine makes the convincing case that poetry can, should, feed the imagination and so improve people's moral and political life together as a community. But I can find not the slightest evidence of this belief in his own poetry, and such a complete disjuncture between professed belief and actual practice (both sincere and long-held commitments) is, as far as I can see, unprecedented.

   Adam Zagajewski writes in Polish and seems to have been well translated by his four translators which include the American poet C K Williams. Every poem flows naturally in English (well, American English) without any false notes or sense of strain. The book is a substantial selection from his three previous collections together with a few early poems and 39 new ones.

   Born in 1945, Zagajewski grew up under the Communist dictatorship and finally emigrated to France in 1982, subsequently dividing his time between Paris and Houston, teaching in both. After years of being respectfully translated and selling in small numbers of copies, his poems came to prominence in the aftermath of 9/11 when they were posted, originally on some American (non-fundamentalist) Christian websites and soon more widely, as expressing the feelings of the moment with great aptness. The New Yorker magazine's memorial edition for 11 September included Zagajewski's poem Try to praise the mutilated world, to which I will return. One of the poems, Fire, can now be seen as relatively early:


      Probably I am an ordinary middle-class
      believer in individual rights, the word
      "freedom" is simple to me , it doesn't mean
      the freedom of any class in particular.
      Politically naive, with an average
      education (brief moments of clear vision
      are its main nourishment), I remember
      the blazing appeal of that fire which parches
      the lips of the thirsty crowd and burns
      books and chars the skin of cities. I used to sing
      those songs and I know how great it is
      to run with others; later, by myself,
      with the taste of ashes in my mouth, I heard
      the lie's ironic voice and the choir screaming
      and when I touched my head I could feel
      the arched skull of my country, its hard edge.
 
   With its flat, self-exonerating language transformed by the violence of metaphor, which itself enacts the simultaneous attraction and horror of extreme political action, this might stand as the best account yet of the forces that produced both 11 September and its continuing aftermath. It brings to mind Heaney's powerful praise in The Government of the Tongue of the political poetry of Zbigniew Herbert, Zagajewski's older contemporary and sometime mentor.

   The problem is that Zagajewski has never again attempted a poem of comparable political force, at least not in this selection. Elegy is a fine evocation of life under dictatorship:

      It was a waiting room with brown walls,
      a courtroom, a clinic; a room
      where tables slumped under files
      and ashtrays choked on ashes.
      It was silence or loudspeakers shrieking.
      A waiting room where you waited
      a lifetime to be born.

R. Says is a sustained attack on state-sponsored literati ("Rats with stipends") and Farewell for Zbigniew Herbert captures the joy of escape:

      Long days spent translating Georg Trakl,
      'The Captive Blackbird's Song', that blissful first Paris
      after years of Soviet scarcity and squalor.

   But gradually the political sombreness of some of the earlier poems (Philosophers, Kierkegaard on Hegel, Lightning, Iron) diminishes to a brief mention, one image among many. In The Gothic, gargoyles become "the languid demons / of torture cells in provincial / cities, small / communists with stiff little hearts"; Dutch Painters shows "The painting of a land / without secret police"; in Wild Cherries, "When you leave, the door immediately / weighs heavier than denunciation". This is political terror reduced to simile.

   It is perhaps natural that Zagajewski's interest in life under dictatorship should decrease after his emigration and particularly after the end of the Communist regimes in Europe. But, taking his work as a whole, it was never a central interest. Zagajewski's abiding interest is the celebration of normality - the beauty and consolation of the world as it is. This appears in New World, the
longest of the early poems, where a breathless attempt to create a crisis feeling (the poem is unpunctuated) is undermined by the poet's unshakeable cheerfulness ("I admit that sunny skies prevail"). And it recurs in the majority of his poems.

   The approach can be demonstrated from Mysticism for Beginners, the title poem of Zagajewski's 1997 collection. The poem begins with an event - a German tourist reading a book titled Mysticism for Beginners - which is followed by a list of events from nature (swallows whistling, white herons standing in a rice field, dusk falling, olive trees, a nightingale singing), from art (a painting in the Louvre, stained glass windows) and from politics ("the hushed talk of timid travelers / from Eastern, so-called Central Europe"). All these are treated as equivalent to each other, as "the elementary course, prelude / to a test that's been / postponed".

   The same approach appears in Try to Paise the Mutilated World which appeared in the New Yorker and is placed last in the book. The poem urges us to praise the mutilated world because there are events from nature (June's long days, wild strawberries, leaves, a thrush's feather) and from human activity (rosé wine, yachts, being together in a white room, a concert, gathering acorns). So far, so innocent and charming. But there are also "nettles that methodically overgrow / the abandoned homesteads of exiles" and executioners that "sing joyfully". No comment is made on these; they are merely part of life's rich pattern.

   Readers seem to respond to the poem in two very different ways: accepting the horrors as part of a life in which there are at least other moments of transcendence or at least consolation, or seeing the poem as heartless and amoral, where exile and execution are presented as equivalent, emotionally and morally, to strawberries, wine and a concert. I suspect that the former is more common and that Zagajewski's cheerful temperament appeals strongly to people who find life too complex or challenging for endless moral discrimination and seek consolation in its surfaces.

   Zagajewski usually presents his lists in plain language, but sometimes he decorates them with images that are startling and fresh but, on reflection, strain sense to and beyond the limit of meaning: "outside the window a rook polishes its eternal gown" (The Trial) [one can't polish a gown]; "the Sanskrit of dusk that speaks / in a glowing tongue of joy" (Late Feast); "the heat, like a customs officer, palpates / each thing in its skin" (The Close of Summer); and at greater length:

          Gothic arches trudge
      upwards, the shoulderblades of sleepy monks
      who've forgotten which word
      wakes the Lord.             (A View of Krakow)

                             September kissed the hills
      and treetops like someone leaving
      on a long trip who only realises at the station
      that he's lost his keys                  (September)

      In old letters I find traces of your writing,
      creeping to the page's top
      like a snail on the wall of a psychiatric ward.
                              (You Are My Silent Brethren)

   These images do not describe reality; they decorate it to charming effect, like decorations in a Donizetti aria or the plaster clouds on which saints kneel or swoon in rococco churches. In fact, Zagajewski is often at his strongest when writing about art or music; a poem like Anton Bruckner is as beautiful and profound a meditation on the strangeness of creativity as I can recall. There are other delights such as the affectionate elegy to an old radio (Electric Elegy), the meditation on the anxiety of travel in Traveler and the sheer brio of The Creation of the World.

   It is hard not to succumb to Zagajewski's optimism and to welcome a substantial collection by a poet who, while not forgetting the deprivations under which he grew up, believes, like Matisse, that art should first and foremost give pleasure.