Book Reviews: Seven Winters in Paris; Belfast Confetti; The Rainmakers; The Magdalene Sermon; Poems with Amergin; Biting the Wax;

The title-piece of Thomas McCarthy's fourth collection is a collection of epigrams strung along the experiences of a stranger in Paris. Ciarain Carson's Belfast Confetti continues and expands the possibilities of that recovered speech found in The Irish for No (1987), using a similar prosody of long lines to assemble an image of Belfast.The Rain makers by Francis Harvey is supplemented by eight poems reprinted from his late first collection, In the Light on the Stones, published twelve years ago.Another quiet voice is that of Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, whose sixth book, The Magdalene Sermon. Her poems are momentary, frequently offering a glimpse of another life rather than a rounded insight.In Poems With Amergin Paddy Bushe lays particular claim to the territory of south-west Kerry, around ballinskelligs where the legendary Amergin landed with the first Celts.Violence also informs the two longest pieces in Peter MacDonald's well-crafted first collection, Biting the Wax