Verse and virtue

Collected Poems
By Michael Longley
Wake Forest University, 346 pp., paperback, $18.95

Domestic Violence
By Eavan Boland
Norton, 79 pp., $23.95

Waterlight: Selected Poems
By Kathleen Jamie
Graywolf, 108 pp., paperback, $14

In the beginning there was the word-hoard, that exclusive stash of poetic utterance for the Anglo-Saxon bards of yore. But the mother tongue has come a long way since Grendel and his ma were marauding the mead halls. So does the far-flung domain of Anglophone poetry qualify as one big happy family these days, or are we still a welter of cultures divided by a common language, as Shaw's classic crack would have it? If the answer most likely lies somewhere in between, it's always instructive to bend an ear to what poets are up to across the pond and see how word is getting around.

Born in Belfast in 1939, the year of Yeats's death, Michael Longley shows understated craftsmanship and even-tempered aplomb in his "Collected Poems," proving there's more than one way to live up to Yeats's valedictory decree ("Irish poets, learn your trade, / Sing whatever is well-made"). Longley learned his trade all right, and his clear-eyed lyric poems in firmly wrought formal stanzas are nothing if not well made: earthy and pithy, supple and companionable, acutely attuned to both natural wonders and native troubles without straining after bardic grandiosity or delphic profundity. Through his eight ample collections he's stuck with the foursquare iambic line through thick and thin, and it's given him all the breathing room he seems to need. You'll never catch him raising his voice, and only rarely hitting a false note.

American readers hankering after a yeasty dose of Irishness will find clover aplenty here -- poems singing the praises of poteen and fleadhs, burrens and bog cotton -- but the more lasting impression may be of an altogether cosmopolitan sensibility at work and play, diligently on the lookout for the emblematic image and talismanic artifact that speaks volumes. In a lifetime spanning the fleeting gloamings of the Celtic Twilight to the roaring zeitgeist of the Celtic Tiger, Longley has stayed true to a poetics of shapely formal feeling that seamlessly encompasses the far and the near, the ephemeral epiphany and the classical verity.

Eavan Boland believes in the hard-earned wisdom of poetry too -- it's conventional wisdom that's long been her bone of contention. Understandably so: Literary and social convention as she found it would have more readily cast her in the guise of a muse than wordsmith. To say that modern Irish poetry resembled a closed fraternal order until Boland came along might not be strictly accurate, but it's hardly a wild exaggeration, and it helps explain why her magnetic north has always been, in her own words, "the meeting place between womanhood and history. . . . The history of silences: the unspoken, the unwritten, the forgotten names, invisible chronicles."

Boland has for many years divided her time between her native Dublin and the States (where she presides over Stanford's creative writing program), so it's not all that surprising that her 10th collection, "Domestic Violence," often reads like an exile's lament. It's no exercise in autumnal nostalgia, however: True to form, Boland continues to arraign her homeland's master narratives and romantic mythologies with her usual terse poise, and remains as haunted as ever by all the matrilineal griefs and grievances that can be neither varnished nor vanquished. If a deeper tinge of melancholy seems to have crept into her elegiac soliloquies on "secret history" this time around, chalk it up to a remorseless historical irony: There is now a "new Ireland / at the end of our road," and no heroic acts of memory or moral imagination can spare her kind from becoming what "we will always be from now on . . . exiles in our own country." Disabused wisdom, indeed -- though as Boland proposes in another poem here, "To Memory," poetry may have no higher calling than to chronicle what's come and gone, leaving behind a written record that's "lyrical / and factual, and true."

In case you missed it, Scotland has now consecrated a post for national poet laureate: The seat is currently occupied by the Glaswegian doyen Edwin Morgan, and his official title is "Scots Makar." The decision to resurrect the brambly old dialect word for "poet" met with a mixed reception, but such is the parlous lot of Scottish letters, whose rich verse heritage mostly seems to fall under the heading of auld lang syne. But 30 years after the death of the firebrand nationalist bard Hugh MacDiarmid, there are signs that the makars are feeling their oats again, thanks to the likes of Don Paterson, John Burnside, and Kathleen Jamie, who appear to have less to prove than their elders but just as much to say.

Jamie's "Waterlight" will be for many Yanks a first introduction to her flinty, fine-tuned verse, and it makes for welcome remedial reading: She's a cool customer with a piercing eye for the naturally sublime and a sharp ear for laconic incantation. Jamie has no beef with the King's English, but she's also given to slipping deftly into throwback Scots vernacular when the occasion strikes, what with a "muckle" here and a "smirr of rain" there, as well as the occasional full-tilt chewy burr ("Dae'ye near'n daur wunner at wur histrie?"). The argot can carry a bite, particularly in certain early poems from this retrospective that grapple with the thornier side of the contemporary Scottish character, but there's little trace of class animus in it, and the pensively mystical bent of her recent canticles descanting on firths and braes suggests that more and more, her heart's in the highlands. Our lingua franca may be long in the tooth, but you'd never know it by the way its makars keep making it new.

David Barber is the poetry editor of The Atlantic. His most recent book of poems is "Wonder Cabinet."