Stephen de Búrca’s impressive first collection, Atlantic Fret (Gallery, €12.95), introduces a significant new voice in Irish poetry. This volume impactfully addresses the theme of pain and its long-term processing. The title poem – an accomplished elegy for the poet’s father – juxtaposes hospital and funeral memories with sea and landscape scenes associated with the deceased. This disjunctive intersplicing of places and times brilliantly conveys the surreality of experiencing the death of a loved one. The outstanding poem Lenition describes a woman’s memory of witnessing an enforced sea swim by boys from a mid-20th century industrial school-type institution. Sparely written, it offers a compelling critique of State-backed, Church-conducted, routine terrorising of children, “their bodies as white as absence on a page // their lips as blue as a bruise”. In the volume as a whole, however, the sea is a space of freedom. For example, in Whale Watching off Reykjavik, imagery of marine wildlife delicately evokes the liberating power of sexual initiation.One of the great pleasures of de Búrca’s work is its rangy, formal ambition, although unsurprisingly, he is still finding his sea legs in this regard. In the sequence Scope and Dredge, the condensed curtal-sonnet form unobtrusively holds and advances meaning. However, in the more capaciously venturesome Tide Clock, the same fixed form – to this reader’s ears – scatters meaning as the poem trips over its own technical laces. A number of poems here are preoccupied with inheritance from forefathers. Some genuflect towards ritualised, Man-of-Aran-type exemplar figures (such as the spirit of Patrick Kavanagh summoned to open Scope and Dredge: “Sea is the word and oyster is the flesh”). Others signal a contrary desire for non-determined identity, the chosen self like “a coin, silver and burnished // by tidal pressures, relieved / of its relief” (Memory of the Docks). De Búrca’s instinct for navigating the hall of mirrors of multifaceted human experience marks him out as a poet who is here for the long haul.In Nithy Kasa’s second collection, How to Make Love to a Colonised Body (Doire Press, €16), one of Ireland’s most striking new poetic voices moves towards maturity. This volume deepens and expands Kasa’s signature concern with the complex relationship between individual freedom and inherited tradition. A rich seam of poems explores the vitality of women’s quest for liberty and flourishing – celebrating African female traditions of care and self-care (Sik’awa: A Woman’s Manifesto; The Maids are Going Home) and honouring the memory of Ireland’s woman revolutionaries (A Wreath of Her Own). Poems exploring the dynamism of nonconforming sexuality (Bloomer Concerts) and which probe intergenerational tension between mothers and daughters (Mama Sighed), further advance this theme. [ New poetry: Rachel Long’s boisterous follow-up; imaginative panache from Billy RamsellOpens in new window ]Ever-alert to her dual heritage in Ireland and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kasa here presents a more relaxed yet clear-cut reclaiming of her African identity as empowering autonomy (see Mangbetu Femme) – not least in relation to religion (The Negro God). Simultaneously, Kasa resists any simplistic or forced identification with forefathers (or mothers): “the ancestors […], if you let / them, they’ll find you” (Gumbo).To be so found demands alertness to the sociopolitical structures that shape insiderhood and outsiderhood. A key series of poems (The Case of the Markles, Dear Emigrant, Touched By the Colours, etc) demonstrates the breadth and precision of Kasa’s engagement with issues of racism. Central to both Irish and African history, the title poem reminds us to “Unlearn / the surmise that colonised bodies dwell in the dark matters afloat”. In this context, Kasa underscores the urgency of civil communication (Careful Language) and open-ended learning (The Lamps in Kildare Street Library). This memorable volume teaches us how and why individual freedom, universal justice and the valuing of cultural inheritance are interdependent rather than mutually exclusive aims. That’s It (Gallery, €11.95) is Eamon Grennan’s 12th main collection and (according to the book’s back cover), his last. His ordinary days becoming ever more miraculous in the light of their expected ending, the volume’s speaker struggles to come to terms with this finality. So too, in many ways, for Grennan’s readers: the fineness and fidelity with which these pared-back late poems face mortality as the music of what happens cannot but make us want more from this consummate lyricist. Yet, these poems also teach us that their Beckettian imagining of death as impetus to the imperative to keep going ─ “On, so – you whisper // between breaths” (Less) – does not come without cost to one who sees in his mirror “the daily stranger / growing stranger daily” (On Reflection). Paradoxically, this highly unified collection moves from darkness into light, from being burdened towards weightlessness, as it “stretch[es] that single note of comfort / you’d hoped against hope for” (At the Breakdown). It does so through elegy’s mainstay, the natural world: birds, streams, weather systems and landscape at once speak for and offset the volume’s pervasive sense of involuntary closure. [ Writer Victoria Kennefick: ‘Women’s anger is very underexplored and misunderstood’Opens in new window ]Even as these poems express fear of approaching nothingness, poetry’s technical resources affirm ongoing vitality; language’s self-delighting florescence is not unlike Grennan’s “crack-voiced crows [that] hustle // their bunched black / bouquet bodies / post-haste home” (Fresh Morning with Dancers). Coming to terms with human transience, these fine-tuned poems acknowledge that there is no real way to prepare for one’s own end, and so they come to rest as they come to life, in the space of ambiguity generated by the volume’s twisty title, That’s It – this phrase’s cross-cutting connotations, “it’s over” and “eureka!”, at once haunting and tantalising the reader. Rita Ann Higgins’s Jiving with Wasps: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, £14.99) – a 350-page cornucopia of wit, wisdom, challenge and tenderness – represents four decades of output from one of Ireland’s major writers. Offering generous selections from her 11 collections to date and a pamphlet-length set of new poems, this publication demonstrates the extraordinary psychological insight, moral depth and social vision of a body of writing that puts human vulnerability, resilience and responsibility front and central stage. Jiving with Wasps allows us to track the evolution of this multi-tongued poet’s inimitable poetic style. Higgins’s voice – acutely alert to the strange within the familiar – communicates through unrivalled command of tonal nuance in polysemous verbal play. Plain-spoken anecdotal reportage and reflection is charged with multilevel meaning through this poet’s unerring ear for tragicomic timing.Ever since her 1986 debut, Higgins has anatomised the hydra-headed monster of everyday injustice and its effects of internalised self-hatred, as generated by Ireland’s unholy alliance of systemic disadvantage, class discrimination and enculturated misogyny. From early poems such as God-of-the-Hatch Man and the unforgettable Some People through to new work such as The Holding Pen and Shop Around, Higgins’s lodestar remains the common duty of care we bear to each other and to the truth. Correspondingly, her work also joyously celebrates the many dreams and belief systems – no matter how seemingly illogical or insufficient – that enable people to retain their sense of self-respect and hope. Across two generations of mapping how “Ireland is changing” while in so many ways remaining the same, Higgins speaks on behalf of all who have been “in the vortex too long”, pleading: “Allow us, the giddiness, the fears. / Gift us, the dove, the olive branch, the years” (Endgame).Rita Ann Higgins’s Jiving with Wasps presents an indispensable mirror to death-dealing cultures of neglect and abuse. By also communicating the basis of effective resistance to them in compassion, solidarity and willingness to confront self-deception, this book is required – and hugely stimulating – reading.Catriona Clutterbuck’s debut collection, The Magpie and the Child, is published by Wake Forest University Press