Maurice Riordan – författare

Quark,n. (Phys.) One of three hypothetical components of elementary particles [from: 'Three quarks for Muster Mark!' in Joyce's Finnegans Wake] - The Concise Oxford Dictionary.In a wonderfully eclectic and lively selection of poems, this anthology counters the notion that science and poetry are magnetically opposed. The model of the two cultures has collapsed. Just as poets write about science and about recent scientific ideas, so too science has reached out to the language of poetry for its own intimations on the wilder shore of the here and the elsewhere. A Quark for Mister Mark includes poems, old and new, whose subject is science - its discoveries, its processes - but also poems which look at the world with an inherently scientific gaze, whether before Copernicus or after Einstein.

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 â?" 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...'

Harold Hart Crane was born in Ohio in 1899. In 1923 he became a copy-writer in New York. White Buildings, his first collection, appeared in 1926, and in 1930 his most famous work, The Bridge, was published. A reaction against the pessimism in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, The Bridge was a love song to the myth of America and its optimism a much needed boon to post-Wall Street Crash America. Hart Crane committed suicide in 1932.

The poems in Maurice Riordan's second collection are unusual in their recourse to the humanist belief in poetry as one of the forms of knowledge, imparting information about the observable world; but they also mix ancient wisdom (signs and wonders) with the open-ended science of the quantum age. Riordan's vision is syncretist. The old and new coexist - interrogating the book's epigraph that 'time is what keeps everything from happening at once' - and this informs his more personal poems: childhood memories of rural Ireland and poems of irretrievable loss nuanced with the restorative intimation that time's arrow is not, perhaps, relentlessly linear.

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 Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, 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.

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 Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, 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.

These poems report on worlds both robust and delicate, from boisterous pub-bluff to the oxygen bubble of an exquisite underwater spider. Whether situated in the quiet lanes of his native Co Cork or amid the bustle of his adopted London, Riordan's poems exist between many states, poised at once in the grip of both activity and stillness, concerned with speaking and listening to what he hauntingly describes as 'the unwonted quiet'. There are tributes to the departed and the living, the befriended and the estranged; there are also conversations with poets, in memory and in translation, from the Spanish and from the Irish. The collection concludes with 'The Pilgrim' - that hovers eerily 'in patrol of the edges', wherever they may be located. But just as these poems can be sage, they are also mischievous, fun-loving, gregarious creatures who like nothing better than to sing or to joke at your ear. The Water Stealer is a book full of invention and delight, whose hypnotic stories remind us of the variousness and the enchantment of the world.

These poems report on worlds both robust and delicate, from boisterous pub-bluff to the oxygen bubble of an exquisite underwater spider. Whether situated in the quiet lanes of his native Co Cork or amid the bustle of his adopted London, Riordan's poems exist between many states, poised at once in the grip of both activity and stillness, concerned with speaking and listening to what he hauntingly describes as 'the unwonted quiet'. There are tributes to the departed and the living, the befriended and the estranged; there are also conversations with poets, in memory and in translation, from the Spanish and from the Irish. The collection concludes with 'The Pilgrim' - that hovers eerily 'in patrol of the edges', wherever they may be located. But just as these poems can be sage, they are also mischievous, fun-loving, gregarious creatures who like nothing better than to sing or to joke at your ear. The Water Stealer is a book full of invention and delight, whose hypnotic stories remind us of the variousness and the enchantment of the world.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE POETRY PIGOTT PRIZE IN ASSOCIATION WITH LISTOWEL WRITERS' WEEKThroughout 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.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE POETRY PIGOTT PRIZE IN ASSOCIATION WITH LISTOWEL WRITERS' WEEKThroughout 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.

Jack Underwood's selection from Maurice Riordan's work over the last forty years allows us to rediscover a poet whose musicality, wit and emotional acuity rank him as a leading poet of his and any generation.Responding to the imaginative range of Riordan's preoccupations, Underwood creates a dynamic arrangement for poems rooted in particularities of time and place, yet enduring in their audacious inventions and pungent ironies. They are compelling in their immediacy, whether they evoke a childhood in rural Co. Cork, describe a remote community that has taken to the treetops to sing, or itemise the novelties and effronteries of aging. Riordan's work appears here as it demands to be read: at once contemporary and timeless, vibrant with the anxieties and pleasures of being alive in the here and now.