BOOK REVIEW / The I and ear of Ireland: 'A Snail in my Prime: New and Selected Poems' - Paul Durcan: Harvill, pounds 16/ pounds 7.99; 'Selected Poems 1972-1990' - Tom Paulin: Faber, 5.99 pounds

THERE IS nothing like national decline for fostering a sense of cultural superiority, and only a nation as seriously in decline as England could find so many ways to look down on a country where poetry is as influential as it is in Ireland. Then again, condescension towards Ireland is so habitual to the English that the variety and subtlety of its forms should be no surprise.

The popularity of Paul Durcan, for example, tends to be explained away in terms of a misty- eyed Celtic preoccupation with the lyrical, the musical and the mythical. In fact, Durcan's sprawling repertoire, his tall stories, dialogues and choruses, remind us that poetry can have popular reach and embody a genuinely countrywide spirit, without sacrificing integrity. He can be uneven, wayward and sometimes obvious, but that is in the nature and form of his journeying. Where a Seamus Heaney or a Derek Mahon distils from the collected essences of formal poetic wisdom - metre, rhyme, stanza - Durcan wanders outdoors for fresh ingredients, happens upon them in his long, straggling, glimpsing lines.

His poems work like days passed moving around cities, full of the unexpected turn, the sudden whim, the absorption of surprise. This is why they often end on a more romantic note than the one on which they begin. So 'The Beckett at the Gate' starts out as a joke about a much- recommended play and ends as a rising chorus of love addressed to a girl he met instead of going to watch it. 'A Spin in the Rain with Seamus Heaney' swerves punningly from a drive to a ping-pong game and ends, appropriately enough, with a discovery about the art they share:

Poetry] To be able to look a bullet in the eye,

With a whiff of the bat to return it spinning to drop

Down scarcely over the lapped net; to stand still; to stop.

Probably nobody since Yeats has mastered repetition like Durcan. He can do it inside one line, as in 'And I think of those heroes - heroes? - heroes' ('In Memory of Those Murdered in the Dublin Massacre, May 1974'), where the poles of a nation's conscience swing for a second about a single word, or on the steps of three lines - 'They will accuse me . . . Of having been at the sherry. / What is wrong with being at the sherry? / Pale dry sherry - her throat, her lips, her eyes' - where he alights upon a word, steadies and sniffs it, and flies with it elsewhere.

If Durcan writes as the 'I' in Ireland, a common man finding common truths, Tom Paulin is a furtive, pointing figure on the edges of sharp tableaux. He is above all an historical poet, bringing a poet's sense of manifold possibility to the givens of the past or the grim fallout of now. Attempts to limit Paulin group around the epithet 'political', though no true poet is political, because politics is mere shrinkage to one thought on all things. The most striking aspect of Paulin's craft is how well he presses lyricism into the service of diverse causes, whether it be the bleakly social ('kids turned fierce / on a tip, / little hard men in boiler suits / locked in a war game'), the tenderly erotic ('yella as the tartan skirt / she slid one tiny bit / to let me touch her pumice-silk / chalky like my glans might be'), or the ringing Audenesque ('At noon, in the dead centre of a faith').

It is a tough and irreducible lyricism, its metrical variety and linguistic depth making it impossible to slum or slur. Political poetry must be amicable and easy: it must be the friend who is no friend because he never tells you what's wrong. If you want political poetry, read The Literary Review. If you want poetry, read the best of Paulin.