Book description
Adam O'Riordan's remarkable first collection traces the hidden paths
from past to present, from the lost to the living, seeking familiarity
in a world of 'false trails and disappearing acts'. Here relatives,
friends and other absences are coaxed into life and urgently pressed
on the reader as they surface, in the flesh.
Journeys begin with indelible detail and open into new and
astonishing landscapes of the head and the heart. Whether in graceful
elegies for the dead or the charged lyrics of love and desire, poems
cross space as well as time, from the 'blackened lung' of Victorian
Manchester and the fateful events of the 1913 Derby, to enter a modern
era of satellites and late night searches for lost lovers. At the
heart of the collection lies the sonnet sequence 'Home', a slant look
at the lives of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, intersected by more
recent, sometimes unsettling, personal portraits.
Clear-eyed and sensuous, these are poems linked by a strong sense of
place and presence, longing and loss; of history captured in an
irrevocable moment. In the Flesh is a startling debut from one
of our finest young British poets.
Adam O'Riordan was born in Manchester in 1982, and educated at
Oxford and London University, where he was awarded the inaugural
Peters, Fraser and Dunlop poetry prize. In 2008 he was awarded an Eric
Gregory Award and was Poet-in-Residence at the Wordsworth Trust in
Grasmere. He lives in London.
In the Flesh includes the sequence, 'Home', a series of
thematically linked sonnets inspired by Dove Cottage, and selected by
the Poetry Book Society as its pamphlet choice in 2009.
www. adamoriordan. com
