Bøger af Maurice Riordan

Throughout these poems, with their roaming sense of first-person, the speakers' minds are cavernous and echoic, primal and sophisticated, observant and raw, in and out of control of themselves. The effect is unpredictable and thrilling, at once a dark art and an illumination of unease and loss and wishfulness. The collection features disquieting songs of a mutable self alongside poignant elegies, interior journeys and subtle (and not so subtle) ripostes to the legacy of Trumpism - while elsewhere encounters with ghostly feet and tongues of fire consort with riffs on Baudelaire, Rilke and Laforgue. These poems twinkle with mischief and humour, making for a pungent and haunting read. Riordan - a poet whose strong, rippling influence is felt by all in his wake - affirms his reputation at the forefront of contemporary poetry.

In a series of timeless and modern-day renditions, Maurice Riordan brilliantly introduces us to the poems that founded Ireland's rich literature. Memorable and accessible, these early lyrics are presented in their classic incarnations by literary giants from both sides of the Irish Sea: in examples by W. H. Auden, Flann O'Brien, Alfred Lord Tennyson, John Montague, Robert Graves and Frank O'Connor. But the anthology is much more than a survey of canonical texts; through a series of specially commissioned poems, fresh eyes are brought to bear on these ancient poems: by Seamus Heaney and Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, by Paul Muldoon and Kathleen Jamie, by Ciaran Carson and Christopher Reid, and many others. The experience is enhanced still further by the enabling hand of Riordan himself, in a sweep of exquisite translations of his own made especially for this publication. Unforgettable and inspirational, a book for giving and for keeping: The Finest Music by some of the art-form's finest players.

At the heart of Maurice Riordan's third collection is a sequence of eighteen dramatic idylls set in rural Cork in the 1950s, in which the subdued microcosm of farm and smallholding - of boundary, townland and parish - is defined through the individual voices of the poet's father and assorted friends, farmhands and neighbours (Moss, Dan-Jo, Davey Divine, the Bo'son, Uncle Tom the Buck, the Gully). The settings of these loosely contiguous fragments almost casually define a historical community, ranging around farm and fields, through furze and ragwort, headland and plantation, haggard and Bog - tracing the immemorial scenes of traditional farming life: cutting drains, harvesting, fencing, potato planting, beet topping a?"e; and their close and intimate topography is recalled with a Proustian fidelity to names (the Long Field, the Kiln Field, the Small Fields, the Hill Fields, Higgs's Field, the Passage, the old Deer Park, the Orchard, the Bottom Glen)The tentative oral fluidity of these remarkable poems flickers on the borderline of prose, resolving complexities into an impression of timeless pastoral life, at once archaic yet precisely pitched in time. Other poems in The Holy Land proffer alternative forms of capture and recapture, and resemble light-sensitive plates storing and restoring what one poem refers to as 'the understory'. Thus the stilled life of 1950s rural Ireland is recreated, with echoes of classical models such as Theocritus, or of traditional Irish materials from the Fenian cycle, celebrating 'the music of what happens'. As Patrick Kavanagh wrote in his poem 'Epic': 'I have lived in important places, times when great events were decided: who owned that half a rood of rock...'