The title poem of Maureen Hynes’s second collection depicts the book as a sort of travel narrative for Amazons: “Some of us wear a piece of the road as an amulet/over our breastbones.” The book’s four sections deal with setting out on the journey, landscapes, love, and death. The poems in Harm’s Way possess a strong and lively female presence, but in this Amazon ride men are associated primarily with pain and death.

Hynes’s visual sense is highly developed and photographic, and she pays close attention to colour in particular. Despite her denial in “Panorama,” she is adept at photographing vast landscapes and recording the sort of curious and alien thing a tourist knows she will want to show others when she gets back home. Many vivid “photos” are narrated in the first, second, and third person, and she is equally assured in each. The poems are woven together deftly through allusions to each other and the title poem, and there are strong motifs, many of which will be familiar to readers of her first book, Rough Skin: the poet’s Irishness, bodies of water, cars and roads, dreams, and papier-maché skeletons.

But Hynes is not a portrait photographer: she fails to make the most of this multiplicity of perspectives, and could stand to let voices other than her own enter the landscape and speak in their own earthy tones. Like Marianne Moore, Hynes has an affinity for the non-human, and seems afraid to write from her weakest and wildest places, as if she can’t trust the reader with the full extent of her anger, sadness, love. Even in her most revelatory poems she is cagey and prefers to master the poem rather than let herself be swept away by it.