Ireland’s foremost living religious poet, the new book includes a sequence, Of Human Flesh, which takes Easters rituals as its occasion, and dwells on its continuing purchase and meaning as the poet remembers others and walks a landscape where, sometimes, as he puts it, the spiritual and material worlds come together: all here fits together, oxbow and pillow-stone, holon and fractal, stunning, admonishing, this morphogenic field. The poems bear witness to a number of different Irelands, and one memorable sequence tracks a family heirloom, a carriage clock, through three different marriages in 1897, 1906 and 1940. Alive to what is comical and even enchanting, his steadfast faith is as well captured in his grip on a childhood memory of Jonah, his Bunnacurry mule, big and raw, / stubborn in hardship and unwilling, with whom he is partnered in what the poem calls a slow, uncomely, cosmic dance.
