Thanks to Parisa Ebrahimi and Clara Farmer at Chatto & Windus for their work on this book. Thanks also to Edmund Gordon for his encouragement and close reading.
In the Flesh
When Love Speaks: Poetry and prose for weddings, relationships and married life (editor)
Adam O’Riordan was born in Manchester in 1982, where he currently lives. In 2008 he became the youngest Poet-in-Residence at The Wordsworth Trust, the Centre for British Romanticism. His first collection In the Flesh (2010) won a Somerset Maugham Award. He is the Academic Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University.
The poems of this dazzling second collection are of contradictory impulses: of abundance and famine, of absence and presence, of endings and new beginnings. Here again are the intelligent, elegant and emotionally potent poems that are O’Riordan’s trademark, yet he also pushes into bolder territories, from a herring famine of 1907 to the Strangeways Prison Riot of 1990.
Bounding place and time, and urging into being both the living and the dead, this crystalline collection captures the struggle, folly and wonder of the human heart.
You crossed the meadow once before,
alone that time, at night,
the ring road in the distance
gathering voice,
the sleeping ponies, thinned by winter,
still as standing stones, the clouds
of breath as you moved among
the broken circle they had formed.
I came with you in early spring
before the buttercups,
birds-foot trefoil, white clover, yarrow,
across the mudflats
a goose receding into boggy underfoot,
bloody gristle and yellowed bone,
the feather line of its splayed wing
opened to the heavens.
Looking back across the common,
to earth unploughed for millennia
where thousands and thousands
of bird tracks scored the mud,
and glistered in the sun
that was dropping over Wolvercote.
Go, he said, and for an hour just stand and look.
I stared into the face, recalling the story
of a murder one morning after mass:
the rain-worn steps of a limestone cathedral,
a scene tended by my mother, her words
embossed a bitterness in breath.
As a girl she was told how they tried
to staunch the wound, the lead slug
fingered at but irretrievable, tiny
bubbles bursting at the corner of his mouth.
Ego sum lux mundi, by the Christ of Taüll
I saw the face at first then no face at all.
Whatever was left of that other life
I laid it out on the Carrer Sant Pau:
a ticket stub, a matchbook, a key fob,
piece by piece I offered it all up.
Naked on the tiles she traced a black
line around her eye, pink circles
on her knees when she stood, her skin
a warm citrine, I lay watching on the sheets.
Later, her quick tongue, hot and drunk.
I called her by another’s name, we fought,
made love again, urgent for each other,
as if my hands might pass right through her.
Blanes, the train delayed,
heat-sheen on the plastic bucket seats
the glad hour almost upon us
when the colours of the waves
are tender and vast.
I looked to the sea and thought
of the forest fire last summer:
pine trunks scorched black
car alarms, petrol tanks blowing out,
how we ran down to the shore,
smoke rolling in like fog,
erasing every one of us.
Buoys from bladders
of pigs and bullocks
mark the fleet nets:
a curtain hung
below the water
at sundown bright
shapes feeding
at the surface,
the herring boat swung in
the prevailing wind,
and left to drift
through the night,
stars on the water
like the silver darlings
who fed there earlier.
Thinner and scarcer,
thinner and scarcer,
the table set for supper
hard bread, a smur of butter.
The new nets do not mend it
she sends them back up empty.
The table set for supper
hard bread, a smur of butter.
How far then to this:
I want to draw a line,
on this borrowed
municipal map,
to trace the skaffie
of family legend
making its way south.
The sea empty of fish,
I want to watch them
finally arrived,
at the new house –
the ‘Village’ with its