Adam O’Riordan has got a lot going for him. He’s tall, dark and handsome and stepping out with Alice Eve, star of She’s Out of My League and Tom Stoppard’s widely acclaimed Rock’n’Roll. He’s got his first book out, too. And it’s rather good. In the Flesh – “I wanted a title that brought together the visceral, the familial, the carnal, as well as ideas of presence and absence, death and decay” – is an exciting and enormously assured collection of poems.
From the opening lines of Manchester – “Queen of the cotton cities, / nightly I piece you back into existence: / the frayed bridal train your chimneys lay / and the warped applause-track of Victorian rain” – to the final words of Pallbearers, a poignant tribute to his gran – “all that we might mask / with these last, late acts of love / and faith and decoration” – you know you are in the company of someone who has something to say and knows how to say it.
O’Riordan was born in Manchester in 1982. He read English at Brasenose College, Oxford (where he met Alice, who was at St Catherine’s) and then studied creative writing with Andrew Motion. His work has appeared in magazines such as Agenda, Poetry and The Wolf, his pamphlet Queen of the Cotton Cities won an Eric Gregory Award and Home was a Poetry Book Society pamphlet choice. He was poet in residence at Dove Cottage and the Wordsworth Trust from 2008-2009, time he used to write most of this, his first collection.
He moves easily between subject-matters, from Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal in 1800 – “Tomorrow will bring rain, a hike in taxes, / rumours from the camps of defeated armies. / But tonight their flames speak of a frugal industry, / what light they made, what light there might yet be” – to Hollywood today – “This life isn’t all hookers and blow you know” – and Dun Laoghaire: “Each week at the drawing school you make ends meet. / So for the next hour you will stand, stripped, / turning like a hare on a spit, as they have you / from every angle.”
If you have ever seen “the mountains huddle like beggars at a brazier,” looked into a fire “as it ate away the soft hours of their lives” or remember “the day you drove a trunk full of pick-axe handles / across the Pennines to the striking miners” you will enjoy O’Riordan, who reinvigorates the sonnet form: “You are distilled before you disappear forever / like the raised glass, the sunlight on one last golden measure.”
