Caitriona O'Reilly's poetry is remarkable for its precise observation of the natural world. Her second collection, "The Sea Cabinet", broadens that clear-sighted vision in poems also haunted by history, consolidating the achievement of her prizewinning debut volume, "The Nowhere Birds." Her title-poem conjures the vanished world of the whaling industry, and serves as a starting-point for other acute meditations on natural and cultural obsolescence. Yet, the habitual concerns of the lyric self are present too, in poems which enact the dilemmas and anxieties of the individual amidst a rapidly...