Paradox is one of the cornerstones of poetry. Emotion jostles with meticulous craftiness, approaching complexity and formal pattern with a deceptive ease and rebelliousness. A poem might comfort, flatter or deceive just as readily as it offers an unflinching truth. It depends on tension as an arrow does its quivering bowstring, going nowhere fast without it. Adam O’Riordan’s first collection, In the Flesh (2010), demonstrated many of these qualities. Its best poems were those with a metaphysical cast of mind: “NGC3949”, named after a galaxy in Ursa Major that mirrors our own, connects with another case of cosmic mistaken identity, spotting “a lover’s shape” in a crowded bar. In poems of poised lyricism, the book revealed an obsession with the line between beauty and violence, but also a fear of erasure, finding consolation in poetry’s potential to commemorate and commit to memory.
From the beginning, A Herring Famine promises more of the same. Its opening poem, “Crossing the Meadow”, blurs two separate memories of a field: one at night, where “sleeping ponies” are “still as standing stones”; another where speaker and confidante find “a goose receding into boggy underfoot, / bloody gristle and yellowed bone”. The language and imagery are both beautiful and stark, musically exact – the kind of deft lyric style we have come to expect from this poet. It is evident throughout, in poems equally balanced between life’s insistence and mortality’s looming presence. Where “The Caracalla Baths” tells of Roman public spaces since used for operas, figuratively “drenched” with the “hot, unstopping blood” of 20th-century fascism, “Sulphur” intersects the gestured-to damage of a relationship with the grim history of Sicilian sulphur mines, ending on an image of stallions “injected with cocaine” for racing, “frothing, teeth bared, wild-eyed in the darkness”.
However, despite its obvious merits, you can’t help but feel there’s something a little too studied about the writing. Those “wild-eyed” horses, for example, feel like an attempt to give the poem an impetus it lacks. “In those / months the commonplace became miraculous” we are told rather than shown, a phrase that calls to mind Seamus Heaney, inviting a natural comparison. Like Heaney’s, O’Riordan’s best poems reveal an unusually precise attention to the texture, weight and subtle music of language. “Glance from the barrel where the bones are bled”, begins “Ghost Ranch”. Read those lines of O’Riordan’s aloud and they force your whole mouth into movement, a trick that the Irish master all but perfected, bringing language to life.
But even great poets have off days, and a characteristic of Heaney’s work – unspoken and almost a blasphemy in certain circles, given his gradual elevation to sainthood – is one that Philip Larkin noted early on, despite gifting the young poet a prestigious award: sometimes it is just too literary and boring. Not dissimilarly, O’Riordan’s lines exhibit a fine degree of polish and charm – few younger British poets can wrench language into such elegant shapes – but the poems can still remain oddly flat, forgettable, lacking that rebelliousness and urgency we look for in language used for its own imaginative purposes.
I say all of this since O’Riordan has a genuine gift, and for any talented writer it can be easy to slip into writing that asks and risks little. Where A Herring Famine excels is in poems that, alongside their craft and guile, wear their heart on their sleeve. “Six Scenes from a Marriage” is the book’s triumph. O’Riordan’s delicate, attentive music is especially suited to capturing the intimacies and harm of our loves; allied to an almost-scientific interest in time’s tricks and distortions, he is able to capture the way we can sometimes feel locked out of our lives, the past constantly eluding us. Recalling his ex-wife “alone on the summer island of her childhood”, the speaker confesses that “I want to write my way back into this love. / To meet her newly resident in silence, in long hours of light”. “I am writing to your absence,” he later recognises, “to the distances which open up between us”; “I am remembering that walk in the rain and early dark”. Moving and honest, graceful but also raw, the sequence is a haunting portrait of loss. It is in many ways O’Riordan’s abiding subject, as another standout poem, “The Leap”, proves. Here a tender, unforgettable truth emerges from an anecdote about a child’s fear: “And when you surfaced, her tears stopped / and we who watched knew all there was of loss, / of stepping off, of how a life // is lived in the reflection of our falling / in the eyes of those we love.”
Elsewhere, O’Riordan pushes his writing into wider historical territory, attempting a blow-by-blow account of the Strangeways prison riot of 1990, “soft flesh breaking against bone, / skulls split like antique oak, / the eggshell of a shattered eye socket”. But where this often feels notes-like, a scattered sequence that hasn’t quite found its form, the tale that gives the book its title is much more effective. Blending anecdotal memories of the poet’s mother’s family – fishermen from Aberdeen who came to work in Manchester’s factories – and social history, “A Herring Famine” imagines his ancestors’ skilled trade “slowly bleeding / from their fingers, // how to thread / a net or weave / a creel”. “What lasts?” asks the speaker. It is a question O’Riordan’s poems will no doubt continue to answer in imaginative, emotive ways.
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