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A Herring Famine by Adam O’Riordan review – poems of craft and guile

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A promising poet’s second collection delivers work full of subtle music that wears its heart on its sleeve

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”.

The language and imagery are both beautiful and stark, musically exact

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