The Irish poet attempts a ‘selfie’ of his 60s, with frank humour and universal connection
Maurice Riordan, in one of his poems, describes a “shoulder tap” as a practical joke. I was not altogether sure what this amounted to until YouTube put me straight – the sneaky touch on a shoulder that leaves the tapped one disconcerted, as they look around to find that there is no one there. Memory itself is the shoulder tap of this collection: the past steals up without warning in often discombobulating bids for attention. In the title poem, it is a boyhood friend Riordan recalls – dead now – who plays this sad prank on him. This is Riordan’s fifth collection in a distinguished career and is finely attuned to the past: he was born in County Cork and his rural Irish roots are still much in evidence.
In Madame Bovary, a single memory recalls his youth, and what particularly pleases is the poem’s assured lack of commentary, an underwritten composure that only comes, if you are lucky, with maturity. Riordan’s rogue father heads off on a drinking spree or, in Irish parlance, a “batter” (I had to look that up too). But the most significant thing here has to be the fading volume of Madame Bovary on the windshield. It exists like a promise: one feels confident that Riordan will have eventually picked the Flaubert up before launching himself upon the literary life.
How do you judge where you find yourself in a life? In the entertaining Hamartia (meaning: the flaw that leads to a hero’s downfall), a nameless woman turns on Riordan in scornful criticism of his work. She denounces his “fixation on the local” and “Those litanies of place names.” And it goes further downhill from there:
And besides you’re stuck in some wormhole.
Band names. Brand names. Dead girlfriends.
You can only drink out of a straight pint glass.
You can only sleep on clean white sheets.
You boil pigs’ feet and eat Golden Wonders in their skins.
Nothing’s to your liking unless you had it moons ago.
Her index finger is prodding my ribcage.
Gently now, as though I’m an endangered species.
You’re a throwback, a quisling, a swipe left, a a a
I’m nodding again. At everything she has to tell me.
Whenever I’m caught off-guard, in a hotel or new bedroom,
it comes as a shock I’m in the presence of another male,
who is florid and badly proportioned.
I thought you can hide in galleries and foreign cities,
in bars in daytime, even in a swimming pool.
There are hours you can spend loosely tethered to a lover.
Shoulder Tap by Maurice Riordan is published by Faber (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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