Book description
At the heart of Maurice Riordan's third collection is a sequence of
eighteen dramatic idylls set in rural Cork in the 1950s, in which the
subdued microcosm of farm and smallholding - of boundary, townland and
parish - is defined through the individual voices of the poet's father
and assorted friends, farmhands and neighbours (Moss, Dan-Jo, Davey
Divine, the Bo'son, Uncle Tom the Buck, the Gully). The settings of
these loosely contiguous fragments almost casually define a historical
community, ranging around farm and fields, through furze and ragwort,
headland and plantation, haggard and Bog - tracing the immemorial
scenes of traditional farming life: cutting drains, harvesting,
fencing, potato planting, beet topping รข?" and their close and
intimate topography is recalled with a Proustian fidelity to names
(the Long Field, the Kiln Field, the Small Fields, the Hill Fields,
Higgs's Field, the Passage, the old Deer Park, the Orchard, the Bottom
Glen) The tentative oral fluidity of these remarkable poems flickers
on the borderline of prose, resolving complexities into an impression
of timeless pastoral life, at once archaic yet precisely pitched in
time. Other poems in The Holy Land proffer alternative forms of
capture and recapture, and resemble light-sensitive plates storing and
restoring what one poem refers to as 'the understory'. Thus the
stilled life of 1950s rural Ireland is recreated, with echoes of
classical models such as Theocritus, or of traditional Irish materials
from the Fenian cycle, celebrating 'the music of what happens'. As
Patrick Kavanagh wrote in his poem 'Epic': 'I have lived in important
places, times when great events were decided: who owned that half a
rood of rock...'
Maurice Riordan has published two collections of poetry, A Word
from the Loki (1995) and Floods (2000) - and is co-editor of two
anthologies, A Quark for Mister Mark: 101 Poems about Science (2001)
and Wild Reckoning: an anthology provoked by Rachel Carson's Silent
Spring (2004). He teaches creative writing at Imperial College London.
