on Maurice Riordan

Chair and Table

This Selected Poems operates on a different basis to that expected – it eschews the usual chronological (or sometimes reverse-order, starting confidently on the newest work) method in favour of an arrangement based on thematic echo, and tone. The editor, Jack Underwood, explains that for him ‘a poem takes place outside of time altogether… is durational and always newly becoming’. It is an interesting method, which allows poems to talk to one another in new ways, across decades, and shows Riordan’s obsessions and habits to be enduring ones, such as the well-judged list, the turn towards the folkish, the morbid but winking poem of the organism, the tall tale. What is lost by this approach is a sense of the poet’s development, the human stuff – to an extent – with poems here about ‘Pushing sixty’ preceding more puckish, youthful ones. Perhaps one isn’t supposed to read a Selected all the way through, anyway, but pick and mix – duck and dive – sampling poems as one-offs, rather than progressions.

Either way, the poems are the thing, and the heart of Riordan’s art seems – still – ‘The Idylls’ from The Holy Land (2007), presented here in full. These poems teeter on the verge of prose poetry but are based, on the whole, on a Frostian reported speech, a relaxed tone and phrasing, and present stories of the work in the fields of Riordan’s father and other recognisable characters from his personal mythology – Dan-Jo, Moss, The Bo’son – their wit and ...