All but the first three poems of the excellent The Fifty Minute Mermaid, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s fifth poetry collection, and her second translated from the Irish by Paul Muldoon, make up a long sequence detailing the predicament of those merfolk who, for reasons that remain unclear, have been forced to relinquish underwater life and adapt to the ways of dry land. The poems are spoken by a voice (or possibly voices) that is emphatically not of the merfolk itself, but which is clearly fascinated by, and attaches much significance to, their plight.

One of the great strengths of the sequence is that this significance is never made entirely clear. No one meaning can be firmly affixed to the central conceit. The world of “Land-Under-Wave” and its loss are used to suggest many things over the course of the book: psychological states (the title refers to the analyst’s fifty-minute hour) both of idyllic, prelinguistic undifferentiation, and of trauma-induced repression; but also ethnic calamity: “The Merfolk and Literature” can be read as a playful distancing of the book from any simple equation of the merfolk’s situation with that of Irish-language speakers, as it rejects “writing screeds of poetry and prose” to lament the loss of a native culture: “They leave that kind of carry-on / To the crowd from the Blaskets”. But while all these ideas surface from time to time, none becomes a governing message for the book: the reader remains freshly intrigued.

This is a particular strength because one theme the sequence touches on is that of the problems inherent in claims to certainty, especially to certainty about other people. The speaker’s (or speakers’) attitude to the merfolk is unstable, veering between sympathy and scorn, but one recurrent voice is anthropological, seemingly objective, a voice we are inclined to trust, given that we would be glad of authoritative information on these alien beings. “The Merfolk on Breastfeeding” begins by relating one of their many difficulties in adapting to land life. The mermaids’ disastrous refusal to breastfeed, and consequent high infant mortality, are explained in terms of their “system of symbols” and adopted veneration of dairy products: “Even in ordinary speech they call what they hold most dear / ‘the butter of my heart’ and ‘top of the milk’”. The merfolk’s tragic wrong-headedness inspires a natural dismay in the reader, but instinctive condemnation is brought up short by the tone of the last stanza:

For, let’s face it, despite their adaptability
and their gift for fading into the woodwork,
like chameleons,
they were water-dwellers before they came on land and, however we might describe
what they’d morph into, it certainly wasn’t
human beings.

Such insistence on the merfolk’s fundamental difference from “us” suggests an unpleasant essentialist agenda behind the claim to scientific detachment. Our critical attention is steered gradually and unsettlingly away from the alien race, and towards the speaker on whom we had initially relied. The merfolk present, at least in part, a strategy by which Ní Dhomhnaill estranges us from our habitual attitudes and assumptions.

The Fifty Minute Mermaid is a slyly funny book, and can also be a moving one. The humour can appear simply in a single good line: “after she had stumbled across the greatest discovery of all – / something even more profound than sex – / by which I mean mascara”, but it also informs the askance world view the poems promote. The collection’s emotional edge derives from its delicate use of the traumas of merlife to present some often bleak facets of female experience: the mermaid’s fundamental unhappiness at her displacement leads to sour, vengeful relations with her daughter, and to an unquiet end. In the haunting penultimate poem, “Our Mermaid Goes Under Again”, she is portrayed

forever singing this perpetual “ech, ech,
ech, ech” throughout the day
and the night as well, coming and going with the great waves of panic and consternation
breaking against her mind as she feels
herself draw closer
to the edge of the abyss.

Ní Dhomhnaill’s poems in Irish are printed with facing-page translations by Muldoon, whose characteristically nonchalant, inscrutable style is a fitting vehicle for Ní Dhomhnaill’s startling sequence. He does insert the odd personal tic: the “instep arches” with which “The Mermaid in the Hospital” ends are, for example, a Frost quotation of which he has made much in the past; those who spot these touches may find them intrusive, but are as likely simply to be tickled by them. Between them, the two poets have produced a remarkable, multifaceted book, that will, I imagine, continue to challenge, surprise and please for as many readings as one chooses to give it.

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
THE FIFTY MINUTE MERMAID
163pp. Gallery Press. £20 (paperback, £13.99).
978 1 85235 375 9

April Warman is completing a DPhil on contemporary poetry at Pembroke College, Oxford. Her articles on Paul Muldoon and Michael Longley have appeared in The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry and in English: The journal of the English Association.

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