Michael Coady’s Going By Water is a large and ambitious project. Always interested in writing about the social weave of individual lives, he uses rivers, the River Suir in particular, to link together his meditations on small-town life. The river has been a governing image for distinctive books by recent English poets such as Ted Hughes, Alice Oswald, Jane Draycott and Sean O’Brien, but while they have generally concentrated on the river as ‘nature’, something whose creature life and time scale stand as a corrective to man’s illusions, Coady sets out instead to capture and value the river’s human communities.

His river poems are less interested in showing us the wet fact of a river than in recording how the Suir is loved, feared, named and talked about: elegies for the drowned are placed side by side with poems of river lore such as “The Wobbler’s Tale”, which begins: ‘He swore / by the holy jingos / and the high cross / of Kilkenny.’ Coady relishes the humours and local idioms of Carrick, and Going By Water is broadly comic and theatrical about the human community of its river town. While there is great lightness in the book’s hop, skip and jump across genres - Coady’s now characteristic mix of verse, photo and prose - his sketches of the town’s characters lack the focus and structure with which, for example, small towns are imagined in comparable works, such as Fellini’s Amarcord and John McGahern’s That They May Face the Rising Sun. Although Coady threads river images through each of the book’s five sections, he is more a chronicler than a shaping participant in Going By Water, inviting other voices into the book and relaxing in their lively and often very funny company.

An exception is “The Nun in Prison”, which builds on Coady’s fine early work on Irish emigrant experience. The central poem in a section about Catholic Paris entitled “Another River”, it recounts a visit to a Carrick native, Frances Doyle, who spent her life in a Paris convent on the Seine (as Sr Veronique). Coady offers a gentle biography of her loneliness there, before, typically, valuing her as a social being, saluted by the citizens she has served in her role as warden in a women’s prison, the gendarmes and the prostitutes, as the poet walks her across a bridge over the Seine. Here and elsewhere in Going By Water Coady tells complicated stories with great economy and emotional directness.

The book’s overarching and sociable sweep does not preclude more formal, brief and private lyrics. The sonnet Stormy Weather , 1938 memorably imagines his parents honeymooning in Killarney:

Go on! Some drinkers called, go on! And so
by the night’s end the place was full of song,
his hat a well of silver and the proprietor
proposing they stay on, with a retainer.
That given time was never quite undone
by all the weather of the years to come.

And Coady’s feeling for what might seem ‘beneath notice’ is evident in the beautiful photographs that stud this big, generous book and - ‘naming these things is the love-act and its pledge’- when he addresses a lover who shares ‘the dark and light / with the Lesser Celandine / unveiling here its nothing / less than cosmic / gesture at our feet’ (“Home”), or when, in Old Flame, he more broadly and lovingly situates himself in the world:

O ageless banner and time bomb of spring
beyond the pale but everywhere within,
O pissabed and laughing tooth of lion,
every year you’re back like an old flame
inciting me to rise and come again.