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Sat 05 May 2007A transformation of observationPoetryIn one of the brief lyrics that distinguish this, his sixth collection, Gerard Smyth - remembering how it was to work in a bakery - talks of "work that became a ritual".It's precisely this sort of transformation that marks the best poems in The Mirror Tent, summoning into the celebratory present not only that bakery but a remembered teacher of English (whose voice was "ceremonious"), a picturehouse ("all of us close together in a dark hush"), a bar in the 1960s ("where we revelled . . . in denim and corduroy"), or some dead friends, among them Michael Hartnett ("bony as the Rock of Skellig").