Books

In the Flesh

(Chatto and Windus, July 2010)

‘Vanishing Points’, a seductive series of snapshots from a family album, opens Adam O’Riordan’s first collection of poems. Negotiating the hidden paths from past to present, from the lost to the living, the poet seeks familiarity in a world of ‘false trails and disappearing acts’, moving through history to enter a modern era where men sit ‘pale as geishas, / by the glow of obsolete / computers’ performing late-night searches for lost lovers. Relatives, friends and other absences are gently coaxed into life, and urgently pressed on the reader as they surface, in the flesh.

Journeys begin with an indelible detail and open into new and astonishing landscapes of the head and the heart. Crossing space as well as time, O’Riordan’s poems move from the domestic interior to the remotest reaches of the cosmos, from ‘the damp walled room’ of a Northern poet to the ‘perforated dark’ of Ursa Major. Striding away from the raucous imaginings of Victorian Manchester, that ‘Queen of the cotton cities’, the collection culminates in a serene sonnet sequence, ‘Home’, a slant look at the lives of William and Dorothy Wordsworth through their personal possessions, intersected by poems treating recent, sometimes unsettling incidents.

Subtle, intelligent, and often moving, In the Flesh is a startling and gorgeous debut from one of our most exciting young British poets.

‘Like Marvell seeing the universe in a drop of dew, O’Riordan’s poetry pays full attention to the intricate patterns and coincidences of the world, and so makes us see it anew’ Clare Pollard

‘Palpable poems … unafraid of striking turns or intimate details … there is much to enjoy in O’Riordan’s control of cadence and bold precision of language’ Poetry Book Society Bulletin