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	REVIEWS THE IRISH TIMES The Blind Stitch. By Greg Delanty. Oxford Poets: Carcanet. 52 pp, £6.95 in UK. An Awful Racket. By Rita Ann Higgins. Bloodaxe. 71 pp, £7.95 in UK. The Nowhere Birds. By Caitríona O'Reilly. Bloodaxe. 63 pp, £6.95 in UK These three lively collections exemplify the diversity of contemporary Irish poetic practice. One by an established poet, another by a writer who has steadily been gaining in competence and esteem over the last decade, and a third by a new poet still in her 20s, they are the products of radically different aesthetic value systems. The books project very different Irelands of the mind, or Irelands of very different minds. Rita Ann Higgins is by now deservedly well known internationally for her rasping, sceptical and yet insistently good-humoured protests against social exclusion and the misuse of power in an increasingly brash and materialistic Ireland. Her poems focus on the experience of harassed mothers, maladjusted sons, narcotically dependent young people and other victims of economic disenfranchisement. Her voice is that of a survivor quietly exhilarated by her own staying power but weighed down by the knowledge that others have lacked the resilience or the luck to come through. The language of Higgins's poems exists at a tiny, crucial remove from actual speech. Its stylised colloquialisms create urgent, sometimes haunting rhythms in monologues by edgy, earthy, unimpressed characters who understand suffering and are yet quick to see the funny side of things. Higgins's poetry has gained in flexibility over the years, and her admirers will be delighted by the extravagant fantasy of 'Good Friday in Majorca' 'Black Dog in My Docs Day', a powerful, affecting elegy on a young male death. An Awful Racket is perhaps the strongest collection yet from this laureate of the dispossessed. Ireland for Greg Delanty is the place he left behind two decades ago to take up a teaching position in St Michael's College in Vermont. He writes with an exile's affection for his native Cork, a city honoured in The Blind Stitch in its own colourful (though insufficiently glossed) dialect. If social justice is Higgins's ultimate value, Delanty's is poetry itself, and many of the pieces in this collection speak of his labouring quest for lyrical perfection. Yeats wrote in 'Adams Curse' that "A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been nought". Delanty's stitching can seem all too visible, with wobbly syntax and uncertain diction slowing the pace of the weaker poems here. His book exploits an elaborate figurative machinery, linking the Cork of his childhood to the India of a recent sojourn through the figure of the leper priest Father Damien, to whom he was devoted as a boy. The poet's mother's remembered needlework connects to the sewing of children in Third World sweatshops and to the relentless poetic stitching of her son. The Indian detail interestingly defamiliarises Ireland at a number of points, and a handful of achieved pieces - ' To My Mother, Eileen', 'The Emerald Isle, Sri Lanka', 'Behold the Brahmany Kite' and the lovely title poem - vindicate Delanty's faith that poetry can be built by a combination of graft and fidelity to the promptings of his own genial personality. Caitríona O'Reilly is a far less social poet than either of her seniors. Ireland exists as a backdrop to many of her poems, but their focus is private and philosophical rather than public. O'Reilly is a strict formalist, who has produced in The Nowhere Birds what must surely be the most startlingly accomplished debut collection by any Irish poet since Paul Muldoon's New Weather in 1973. Many of the poems chart the growth of a young girl's awareness from early childhood through anorexic adolescence to tentatively stable adulthood, but they are written with such cool finesse that it would be vulgar to speculate as to whether they are autobiographical and absurd to call them confessional. Her lyrics are utterly wrapped up in themselves like the bats in the remarkable 'A Lecture Upon the Bat'. O'Reilly's technical command is dazzling when she puts the sonnet and sestina through their paces in poems like 'Thin' and 'Augury'. Some of the pieces towards the end of The Nowhere Birds seem less taut and less inevitable in their word choices than the other lyrics, giving the impression of a slight rush to make up a book-length collection. The Nowhere Birds is none the less a most arresting volume. Watch this space. Patrick Crotty is Head of the English Department at St Patrick's College, Drumcondra