with a great poem about my home city: 'Manchester', I truly enjoyed this 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 theDerby, 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.
Cleareyed 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,
A really strong debut poetry book from a few years back and I think he has another one out now that I've yet to read, The poems are very neatly crafted and are very elegant and concise and never overstay their welcome which I liked, Some nice imagery evoked within these pages and the poems feel as if they have been well thought through and written with a lot of care and attention.
. . overall a clean, crisp and cultured first collection, I read this for the first time in high school and didn't get most of them, I'm glad I kept it and decided to give it another go, What a treasure trove of poems, Full of beautiful imagery and inspiring works, Thoroughly enjoyable, and would recommend to any poetry fan, ORiordans debut collection was published in the UK inand won a Somerset Maugham Award in December it will be released in America for the first time, My favorite poems were about Victorian Manchester,s suffragettes and the Wordsworths, this last based on the authors year in residence at their Lake District cottage, I also liked “The Corpse Garden” about the outdoor forensic lab in Knoxville, Tennessee and a couple of multipart poems that seem to enliven family history,
Its the vocabulary and alliteration that make these poems there are only a handful of rhyming couplets, The later poems interested me less, especially a couple of subtly erotic ones that rely on clichéd symbols like oysters,
Overall favorite lines, from the start of “Manchester”:
Queen of the cotton cities,Unfortunately I did not like any of the poems in this collection, but I did like the style, Something about his writing makes me want to read more of his work, Adam ORiordan was born in Manchester in, He read English at Oxford and inbecame Poet in Residence at The Wordsworth Trust, the Centre for British Romanticism, His first collection of poems In the Flesh won a Somerset Maugham Award, his second A Herring Famine was followed by a critically acclaimed collection of short stories The Burning Ground.
nightly I piece you back into existence:
the frayed bridal train your chimneys lay
and the warped applausetrack of Victorian rain.
Youre the blackened lung whose depths I plumb,
the million windows and the smokeoccluded sun,
He is married with two children and teaches at the Manchester Writing School where he is Reader in Contemporary Poetry and Fiction, .