Floods

(Paperback, Main)

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Description

Floods, Maurice Riordan's second collection, continues the preoccupation with instability and flux voiced in his earlier A Word from the Loki, a Poetry Book Society Choice. These poems recall the humanist tradition of poetry as a means for imparting knowledge about the observable world; but they also mix ancient wisdom (signs and wonders) with the science of the quantum age. The old and new coexist - interrogating the book's epigraph that 'time is what keeps everything from happening at once' - and this informs the more personal poems: childhood memories of Ireland and poems of irretrievable loss tempered with the intimation that time's arrow is not, perhaps, relentlessly linear.

Author Bio

Maurice Riordan was born in 1953 in Lisgoold, Co. Cork. His first collection, A Word from the Loki (1995), was nominated for the T. S. Eliot Prize, as was The Water Stealer (2013). Floods (2000) was a Book of the Year in both the Sunday Times and the Irish Times, and The Holy Land (2007) won the Michael Hartnett Award. He lives in London, where he has taught at Imperial College and Goldsmiths College. Riordan was Editor of The Poetry Review from 2013 to 2017 and is Emeritus Professor of Poetry at Sheffield Hallam University.