The poems in Medbh McGuckian's The Soldiers of Year II have a strong sense of inevitability. Even in the poet's more impressionist moments, each word has palpable weight. This gravity allows the poet to make startling departures without ever losing her reader. For while she appeals to a collective sense of Irish history, McGuckian colors her lines with disjunctive sentence structure, dream imagery, and luminously mixed metaphors. The oddness never seems affected. She is one of the few writers for whom the word "experimental" actually makes sense. So many of her poems seem to test specific questions: What is the boundary between the individual and her circumstances? How far can that boundary be transgressed? Where is the line between reality and the imagination? How can that line be redrawn in artwork?

The poems in this collection have appeared in Ireland and the United Kingdom in two separate books, Drawing Ballerinas and The Face of the Earth, both from Gallery Press. Generous selections from each of those volumes form the two halves of this new one. Reading The Soldiers of Year II feels, therefore, like reading a selected poems: you get to survey what this poet has been doing. In fact, several of the poems have an ars-poetical bent to them. Take the first stanza of "The Palace of Today," the title poem of the opening section, which McGuckian dedicates to the memory of Oscar Wilde:

The meaning is very much
a rhythmical one, the same law
in blossom on the shoulder-high
fork of a shrub-like tree,
just streaming out presence
and expecting nothing.

The first thing to notice about this stanza is that McGuckian writes in her own style, not in Oscar Wilde's. Throughout the book, the poet creates drama by setting the given material of history against her own imagined material. In this passage, for example, the image of the tree tempts comparison with Wilde himself, whose sexuality and intellectual bravado offered an example of "just streaming out presence / and expecting nothing." But to insist on that analogy would be too forceful: if Wilde and the tree are tenor and vehicle here, they maintain real distance from each other, a distance appropriate to the elegiac tone.

McGuckian matches that talent for imagery with her sense of rhythm. "The meaning is very much / a rhythmical one," she writes, and everywhere in the book her verse movement maintains strength and exactitude. No poem displays this skill better than "Oration," in which the poet addresses a man named Harper Daniel. (Guinn Batten's fine essay at the end of the book explains that Daniel is both the grandson of Gregory Peck, and a descendant of the Irish hunger striker, Thomas Ashe.) "Oration" ends with a description of salmon:

    the Boyne salmon prized in its bend
in water colour, never out of season,

its great eye redemptive in the weight
of its dry lustre. How it returns

hedging to its Virgilian setting,
its motion heavy with rest, and

how I am forced by sound alone to learn
from that afflicting language

with its busy words, never to use
a word that has not first been won,
nor write your name till it becomes the man.

As her sentences surge across the lines and tercets, McGuckian conveys the force of the salmon's return. She also sustains her impressively precise diction. Each word has indeed been won. "Virgilian," for instance, might be a strange modifier for a salmon's spawning grounds, but it reflects on the pastoral tradition behind this scene. "Hedging" has even more curiosity and precision: it conjures the land the river moves through; it suggests that death might be a compromise with nature, something like "hedging" one's bets; and it alludes to the "hedge schools," where eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Irish people met (illegally) to learn their native language, as well as to read classical authors like Virgil. Throughout The Soldiers of Year II, McGuckian rewards her reader with just such multi-layered nuance. Her strength of feeling and her prosodic subtlety should earn her serious consideration from American readers.

— Peter Campion