Book description
The poems in Maurice Riordan's second collection are unusual in
their recourse to the humanist belief in poetry as one of the forms of
knowledge, imparting information about the observable world; but they
also mix ancient wisdom (signs and wonders) with the open-ended
science of the quantum age. Riordan's vision is syncretist. The old
and new coexist - interrogating the book's epigraph that 'time is what
keeps everything from happening at once' - and this informs his more
personal poems: childhood memories of rural Ireland and poems of
irretrievable loss nuanced with the restorative intimation that time's
arrow is not, perhaps, relentlessly linear.
Maurice Riordan was born in 1953 in Lisgoold, Co. Cork. His first
collection, A Word from the Loki (1995) was nominated for the T. S.
Eliot Prize. Floods (2000) was a Book of the Year in both the Sunday
Times and Irish Times. The Holy Land (2007) won the Michael Hartnett
Award. He lives in London and has taught at Imperial College and
Goldsmiths College, and is currently Professor of Poetry at Sheffield
Hallam University.
