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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.
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.