Selected Poems

(Paperback, Main)

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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 this 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: as at once contemporary and timeless, vibrant with the anxieties and pleasures of being alive in the here and now.

Author Bio

Maurice Riordan was born in 1953 in Lisgoold, Co. Cork. He lived in Canada and Spain before moving to London in the early 1980s. He is editor of A Quark for Mister Mark: 101 Poems About Science and The Finest Music: Early Irish Lyrics in Translation.

Jack Underwood has published two collections of poems, Happiness (2015) and A Year in the New Life (2021). He is Senior Lecturer in English at Goldsmiths College.