Poetry review – SELECTED POEMS: Paul McDonald enjoys a well-chosen and well-arranged selection of Maurice Riordan’s work
Selected Poems
Maurice Riordan
(chosen & introduced
by Jack Underwood)
Faber & Faber
ISBN-13: 978-0571384990
£14.99
In presenting his selection of Riordan’s poems, Jack Underwood decided to abandon the conventional chronological approach, feeling, he says, that a poem ‘takes place outside of time’, with a ‘changeable and specific relationship with any given reader’. It’s true that chronology can impose reductive narratives on a poet’s oeuvre, potentially distracting hierarchies of maturation and deterioration. Like Underwood, I think of poems as ‘durational and always newly becoming’, and it’s useful if poems can be enjoyed on their own terms. Underwood’s non-chronological arrangement reveals Riordan’s primary themes, whilst creating unexpected juxtapositions, contrasts and connections that make for a delightful book.
It opens with one of his more recent poems, “The Seven Songs of Myself” (from Shoulder Tap (2021)). Whitmanesque in tone and reach, this catalogues life’s positives and negatives, beginning with an account of the speaker’s typical day: ‘Every morning I get myself out of bed, every morning I scrub, I shave, I shine my teeth’. Details accumulate revealing the speaker’s variegated and morally complex character – ‘I google porn sites and download more Bugs Bunny’. As the poem’s range broadens, his complexity and flaws are seen in the context of an equally flawed universe, whose positives and negatives he continues to list. It closes with an inventory of benedictions phrased with biblical syntax reminiscent of Whitman, contradicting themselves in a manner he’d appreciate; like him, Riordan can accommodate multitudes:
Blest be those who curse the hour we were borne to such
a pass.
Curst be the righteous. Curst be the whited sepulchres.
Curst be the Just.
Blessings on my neighbour. On her streetwise kids. On the
street cleaner.
Blessings of Whitsun on the wedding or wake still on at
the Legion.
One could easily justify closing the selection with this poem. It has the feel of a lebensphilosophie, a hard-earned worldview informed by a life of experience and reflection. But I can see the sense of opening with it too, introducing the mindset of the poet behind the book: his capacity, in Underwood’s words, for ‘mischief and subtle provocations’, his ‘frank but fearful danse macabre’, and tendency to exhibit, ‘both high and low appetites’. It establishes the poet’s character in our mind, and we trust his voice more for this early insight into his humanity. It is a poem about the self which feeds beautifully into the piece that immediately follows: “The Changeling”, about the difficulty of understanding and locating the self. It closes with the lines
There are hours you can spend loosely tethered to a lover.
There’s the solace of watching over a sleeping baby.
The peace at night in the company of a dead body.
Riordan undermines the idea of himself as a fixed entity, and hence as an authority; he is a ‘loosely tethered’ ‘changeling’, prone to flux, and perhaps, like the speaker of “Seven Songs”, contradiction. It’s also a poem about isolation, a notion conjured brilliantly in the reference to ‘peace at night in the company of a dead body’. The poet here, in keeping with Underwood’s view of poems in general, appears to exist outside time. This sense of detachment is developed further in the book’s third poem, “The Lull”, from an earlier collection, The Water Stealer (2013). This explores the idea of time literally standing still, a space beyond time where mistakes can be corrected; Riordan’s ability to evoke such a space in language reflects his remarkable talent:
one of those days when the thud of a football
hangs in the deadened air. But there was no thud
We feel the pause as the ball hangs in the air, anticipating a ‘thud’ that never comes: if you don’t believe it is possible to hear silence, then read it again! Time stands still in this poem – ‘if I’d looked / at my watch just then the digits would have stuck’ – and this stasis offers a moment of opportunity for insight:
before whatever it is keeps the world scary
and true breaks loose. A squirrel turns tail
overhead, a chestnut rolls to the ground, and with it
a drawn-out scream arrives from childhood.
The scream at the end implies a darkness often present in Riordan’s poems, his ‘fearful danse macabre’, echoing the darkness of the poem that precedes it, together with its atmosphere of detachment and isolation. While Underwood doesn’t divide the book into sub-headed themed sections, then, it soon becomes clear that there’s intelligence behind the organisation, and his groupings reveal connections that might be missed with a chronological structure. Divorced from notions of cultural history and aesthetic development, what emerges is a sense of Riordan’s creative sensibility: its underpinning character and complexion.
Riordan has a strong sense of the significance of the past, and numerous poems are anchored squarely in childhood. We see this in his prose sequence, “The Idylls”, offering evocative sketches of rural life in mid-twentieth century Ireland, and the characters who worked the family farm. The idea of a pastoral idyll is countered here, at least by his father, seen raging against his lot in drunken despair, and threatening to sell the farm: ‘It was only mud, my father said. Nothing but muck and mud’. But Riordan himself has a powerful affinity with the rural, evident throughout the book: “The Nests” is a great example:
You ask again about the nests – the wren’s
hung in the ivy above the broken pier,
a goldcrest’s low in the privet,
the robin’s safe in the clump of pampas.
And below the Lane Gate, coal tits
have built in the hollow post.
If you run your hand up the damp shaft
you’ll find the spot, where the metal is warm.
Riordan’s flair for vivid language is noticeable again here – ‘the spot, where the metal is warm’ locates the image in a tactile, relatable moment that puts us in touch with the bird’s creatureliness, and the speaker’s own sense of connection. It feeds into the poem’s principal theme of bonding, both with his lover and the world that contains them:
We come in due course to a river, where I lie face down
on your surface, the rain soft on my spine.
His lover’s ‘surface’ is also the Earth’s surface, and the speaker links both to the universe beyond with his reference to ‘the soft rain on [his] spine’. This connection is beautifully underscored by subtle sound patterning, particularly the fricative bond between ‘face’ and ‘surface’ and the sibilant splicing of ‘surface’, ‘soft’ and ‘spine’.
We often see tension between past and present in Riordan’s work, sometimes on an exploration of the impact of modernity on rural life and the world of his childhood. “Rural Electification, 1956”, for instance, is one of several responses to the clash between old and new. A ‘pole-man’ helps bring electricity to mid-century Lisgoold, joking with the locals about how his digging might take him all the way to Australia, regaling them with tales of his work in London, and the nature of ‘ACDC, ohms, insulation, potential difference’; the poem closes with characteristic ambivalence:
so that the lights of Piccadilly
were swaying among the lamps of fuchsia,
before he disappeared into the earth.
The juxtaposition of Piccadilly lights and Lisgoold’s lamp-shaped fuchsia beautifully registers the community’s scepticism about progress, as does the final image of the pole-man’s descent into a subterranean realm of darkness! But, as with most poems here, it’s hard to discern a clear moral position – the pole-man’s fate is framed within a joke, and can’t be construed as an indictment of technological progress. Riordan’s perspective tends to be detached and observational, giving his voice a patina of objectivity that serves him well, and again makes us more inclined to trust him. This continues when the clash between past and present is focused on the self, as in “The Flight” where his dead mother haunts his dreams:
For a good half hour this morning, from five
till the mobile's ringtone woke me in a sweat,
I was young again and Mammy was alive.
In the dream he’s lost his passport, and he phones his mother to help: ‘But I couldn’t keep our mother on the line / How come you cannot use a phone! I roared’. He creates a scene capturing the weirdness of dreams in a way that is at once comic and poignant:
Then two nieces showed up, grown up, all smiles
in a red MG. I’d no notion who they were.
Yet they took me in. With luck I’d make my flight,
if Mammy now would ring me on my mobile.
Again this poem points in two directions: the speaker is tormented by the technology that wakes him ‘in a sweat’, yet he criticises his deceased mother’s inability to use it. This seems to parallel his equally ambivalent emotional relationship with the past – his dependence on technology conflicts with his desire to be free of it, just as his desire to live as an adult conflicts with his childlike need for maternal assistance. There’s no attempt to interpret or evaluate his conflict, of course: he shows rather than tells, but his succinct and suggestive details make for a powerful, psychologically frank poem typical of this fine writer.
The volume provides an excellent selection of Riordan’s work, and its non-chronological organisation is a creative act in itself, offering an astute response to his best writing so far. It’s clear he was in good hands with Underwood, himself a former student of Riordan’s, and gifted poet in his own right. He understands his teacher’s oeuvre, and does it justice.
May 30 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Maurice Riordan
Poetry review – SELECTED POEMS: Paul McDonald enjoys a well-chosen and well-arranged selection of Maurice Riordan’s work
In presenting his selection of Riordan’s poems, Jack Underwood decided to abandon the conventional chronological approach, feeling, he says, that a poem ‘takes place outside of time’, with a ‘changeable and specific relationship with any given reader’. It’s true that chronology can impose reductive narratives on a poet’s oeuvre, potentially distracting hierarchies of maturation and deterioration. Like Underwood, I think of poems as ‘durational and always newly becoming’, and it’s useful if poems can be enjoyed on their own terms. Underwood’s non-chronological arrangement reveals Riordan’s primary themes, whilst creating unexpected juxtapositions, contrasts and connections that make for a delightful book.
It opens with one of his more recent poems, “The Seven Songs of Myself” (from Shoulder Tap (2021)). Whitmanesque in tone and reach, this catalogues life’s positives and negatives, beginning with an account of the speaker’s typical day: ‘Every morning I get myself out of bed, every morning I scrub, I shave, I shine my teeth’. Details accumulate revealing the speaker’s variegated and morally complex character – ‘I google porn sites and download more Bugs Bunny’. As the poem’s range broadens, his complexity and flaws are seen in the context of an equally flawed universe, whose positives and negatives he continues to list. It closes with an inventory of benedictions phrased with biblical syntax reminiscent of Whitman, contradicting themselves in a manner he’d appreciate; like him, Riordan can accommodate multitudes:
Blest be those who curse the hour we were borne to such a pass. Curst be the righteous. Curst be the whited sepulchres. Curst be the Just. Blessings on my neighbour. On her streetwise kids. On the street cleaner. Blessings of Whitsun on the wedding or wake still on at the Legion.One could easily justify closing the selection with this poem. It has the feel of a lebensphilosophie, a hard-earned worldview informed by a life of experience and reflection. But I can see the sense of opening with it too, introducing the mindset of the poet behind the book: his capacity, in Underwood’s words, for ‘mischief and subtle provocations’, his ‘frank but fearful danse macabre’, and tendency to exhibit, ‘both high and low appetites’. It establishes the poet’s character in our mind, and we trust his voice more for this early insight into his humanity. It is a poem about the self which feeds beautifully into the piece that immediately follows: “The Changeling”, about the difficulty of understanding and locating the self. It closes with the lines
Riordan undermines the idea of himself as a fixed entity, and hence as an authority; he is a ‘loosely tethered’ ‘changeling’, prone to flux, and perhaps, like the speaker of “Seven Songs”, contradiction. It’s also a poem about isolation, a notion conjured brilliantly in the reference to ‘peace at night in the company of a dead body’. The poet here, in keeping with Underwood’s view of poems in general, appears to exist outside time. This sense of detachment is developed further in the book’s third poem, “The Lull”, from an earlier collection, The Water Stealer (2013). This explores the idea of time literally standing still, a space beyond time where mistakes can be corrected; Riordan’s ability to evoke such a space in language reflects his remarkable talent:
We feel the pause as the ball hangs in the air, anticipating a ‘thud’ that never comes: if you don’t believe it is possible to hear silence, then read it again! Time stands still in this poem – ‘if I’d looked / at my watch just then the digits would have stuck’ – and this stasis offers a moment of opportunity for insight:
The scream at the end implies a darkness often present in Riordan’s poems, his ‘fearful danse macabre’, echoing the darkness of the poem that precedes it, together with its atmosphere of detachment and isolation. While Underwood doesn’t divide the book into sub-headed themed sections, then, it soon becomes clear that there’s intelligence behind the organisation, and his groupings reveal connections that might be missed with a chronological structure. Divorced from notions of cultural history and aesthetic development, what emerges is a sense of Riordan’s creative sensibility: its underpinning character and complexion.
Riordan has a strong sense of the significance of the past, and numerous poems are anchored squarely in childhood. We see this in his prose sequence, “The Idylls”, offering evocative sketches of rural life in mid-twentieth century Ireland, and the characters who worked the family farm. The idea of a pastoral idyll is countered here, at least by his father, seen raging against his lot in drunken despair, and threatening to sell the farm: ‘It was only mud, my father said. Nothing but muck and mud’. But Riordan himself has a powerful affinity with the rural, evident throughout the book: “The Nests” is a great example:
Riordan’s flair for vivid language is noticeable again here – ‘the spot, where the metal is warm’ locates the image in a tactile, relatable moment that puts us in touch with the bird’s creatureliness, and the speaker’s own sense of connection. It feeds into the poem’s principal theme of bonding, both with his lover and the world that contains them:
His lover’s ‘surface’ is also the Earth’s surface, and the speaker links both to the universe beyond with his reference to ‘the soft rain on [his] spine’. This connection is beautifully underscored by subtle sound patterning, particularly the fricative bond between ‘face’ and ‘surface’ and the sibilant splicing of ‘surface’, ‘soft’ and ‘spine’.
We often see tension between past and present in Riordan’s work, sometimes on an exploration of the impact of modernity on rural life and the world of his childhood. “Rural Electification, 1956”, for instance, is one of several responses to the clash between old and new. A ‘pole-man’ helps bring electricity to mid-century Lisgoold, joking with the locals about how his digging might take him all the way to Australia, regaling them with tales of his work in London, and the nature of ‘ACDC, ohms, insulation, potential difference’; the poem closes with characteristic ambivalence:
The juxtaposition of Piccadilly lights and Lisgoold’s lamp-shaped fuchsia beautifully registers the community’s scepticism about progress, as does the final image of the pole-man’s descent into a subterranean realm of darkness! But, as with most poems here, it’s hard to discern a clear moral position – the pole-man’s fate is framed within a joke, and can’t be construed as an indictment of technological progress. Riordan’s perspective tends to be detached and observational, giving his voice a patina of objectivity that serves him well, and again makes us more inclined to trust him. This continues when the clash between past and present is focused on the self, as in “The Flight” where his dead mother haunts his dreams:
In the dream he’s lost his passport, and he phones his mother to help: ‘But I couldn’t keep our mother on the line / How come you cannot use a phone! I roared’. He creates a scene capturing the weirdness of dreams in a way that is at once comic and poignant:
Again this poem points in two directions: the speaker is tormented by the technology that wakes him ‘in a sweat’, yet he criticises his deceased mother’s inability to use it. This seems to parallel his equally ambivalent emotional relationship with the past – his dependence on technology conflicts with his desire to be free of it, just as his desire to live as an adult conflicts with his childlike need for maternal assistance. There’s no attempt to interpret or evaluate his conflict, of course: he shows rather than tells, but his succinct and suggestive details make for a powerful, psychologically frank poem typical of this fine writer.
The volume provides an excellent selection of Riordan’s work, and its non-chronological organisation is a creative act in itself, offering an astute response to his best writing so far. It’s clear he was in good hands with Underwood, himself a former student of Riordan’s, and gifted poet in his own right. He understands his teacher’s oeuvre, and does it justice.