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The Secret Frontiers, Judy Gahagan, 2008, Enitharmon Press. £9.95. ISBN 978-1-9046346-7-6.

A Lope of Time, Ruth O’Callaghan, 2009, Shoestring Press. £9.00.
ISBN 978-1-9048868-8-4.

I’m not sure how many people read poetry reviews, other than the poets concerned and their publishers. Nor do I think I’ve ever rushed out to buy a poetry book because a reviewer urged me to. We know the reasons – there are a lot of them; they’re expensive; we are reluctant to invest in a poet we do not know. And it is difficult to gauge that poet’s quality when the reviewer quotes only a few lines; a good poem should be indivisible. So I have always thought that if I were a reviews editor I’d notice every book that comes out, but quote one short representative poem from each to let the reader make up her own mind.

Judy Gahagan’s collection begins with Wearing Your Homeland:

Would that have been you
I saw once in virtual space
moving across a pitiless empty quarter?
The dunes obliterate the frontiers
the haboob – the great wind – comes
to obliterate the roads and destinations
all of you walking to …

here you are – you’ve brought
a placeless place of scouring light
the shade-less shadow under the sun
midday that drains all colour from the land
till dusk refills it with cinnabar and madder
and the clothes you’re swathed in here
are orange, ochre, patterned henna –
at this cash-point; a frontier between us.
I can’t read you yet, nor you me.

We can’t ‘read’ one another; that is the theme of this collection. She lives, apparently, in London (where a third of the population was born overseas), surrounded by refugees, veiled women and people in exotic clothes. They look colourful and dignified but they speak strange languages and have terrible histories. Meanwhile, a war is going on (Virtual Spring in Afghanistan), and we’re involved, but the closest we ever get to meeting the victims is on screen.

Frontiers are everywhere. People we know die and become invisible (Julia Rising is a good poem about how a woman’s spirit rises through the roof of her house leaving behind only words); ‘shadow-children’ wearing the same logos as our own children disappear into the Third World; an unborn baby smiles from the screen. A fine collection for an age of high technology and mass movements of people.

Judy’s poems are of roughly even quality but Ruth O’Callaghan’s vary wildly, from the very good indeed to those which say very little. My favourite is Incident in a Small Community:

That night there was snow-light bearing hard cold
to crisp cotton sheets, the crump of men’s boots,
voices rasping against the bitter air the same name
over and over in bass, baritone but not belly deep
as the moan of the woman anticipating loss,
while the father waited, wordless, to comfort her.

That night, just beyond the edge of their farmlands,
taking direction from a spine of trees, they climbed
Stoneseat, Rushdown, came to Havenmoor
and a mound roughly covered, untouched by foxes,
the same length as the girl-woman who’d teased
each of them, thinking she knew the measure of each ...

But because the men did, having fought together
at a time when life was cheap and skirt cheaper,
to this night each man avoids the others’ eyes,
each remains apart scything his own narrow strip:
each prays that that night a stranger had passed.

This works because it gives us just enough information; we know it’s set in the north country, in winter and not very long after the war, but we don’t and never will know who the murderer is – a poem is not a detective story. It is powerful because it implies a whole bleak landscape of violence and bad male/female relationships. In this poem, the victim has, and needs no name, but in others there are many names I do not recognise – McCready, Jon-Jo, Brassy Jean etc. Particularly frustrating was Letters in a Time of Nest Building, a poem of fourteen lines which mentions four different people, ‘the Countess’, ‘Inge’, ‘Kenneth’, and ‘Mr Saikaku Hirobumi’, as well as Hitler. Ought I to have known who they are, or were? Perhaps, but I suspect that most other readers won’t know either.

My other gripe is that there are too many short poems about trivial subjects, like taking down the Christmas decorations or draining a last drop of tea. Others, like 8.47 p.m., say little except that it is evening and something bad is probably about to happen. Indeed there are constant menacing undertones, references to car crashes and hospital patients. Visiting Time, a tribute to the poet’s Irish father, is outstanding, and shows what she can do when she is writing about something that matters.