In the Flesh

by Adam O'Riordan

Adam O'Riordan's remarkable first collection traces the hidden paths from past to present, from the lost to the living, seeking familiarity in a world of 'false trails and disappearing acts'. Here relatives, friends and other absences are coaxed into life and urgently pressed on the reader as they surface, in the flesh.

Journeys begin with indelible detail and open into new and astonishing landscapes of the head and the heart. Whether in graceful elegies for the dead or the charged lyrics of love and desire, poems cross space as well as time, from the 'blackened lung' of Victorian Manchester and the fateful events of the 1913 Derby, to enter a modern era of satellites and late night searches for lost lovers. At the heart of the collection lies the sonnet sequence 'Home', a slant look at the lives of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, intersected by more recent, sometimes unsettling, personal portraits.

Clear-eyed and sensuous, these are poems linked by a strong sense of place and presence, longing and loss; of history captured in an irrevocable moment. In the Flesh is a startling debut from one of our finest young British poets.

Genres: Poetry

49 pages, Paperback

First published July 14, 2010

About the author

Adam O’Riordan was born in Manchester in 1982. He read English at Oxford and in 2008 became Poet-in-Residence at The Wordsworth Trust, the Centre for British Romanticism. His first collection of poems In the Flesh won a Somerset Maugham Award, his second A Herring Famine was followed by a critically acclaimed collection of short stories The Burning Ground. He is married with two children and teaches at the Manchester Writing School where he is Reader in Contemporary Poetry and Fiction.

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

O’Riordan’s debut collection was published in the UK in 2010 and won a Somerset Maugham Award; in December it will be released in America for the first time. My favorite poems were about Victorian Manchester, 1910s suffragettes and the Wordsworths, this last based on the author’s year in residence at their Lake District cottage. I also liked “The Corpse Garden” – about the outdoor forensic lab in Knoxville, Tennessee – and a couple of multi-part poems that seem to enliven family history.

It’s the vocabulary and alliteration that make these poems; there are only a handful of rhyming couplets. The later poems interested me less, especially a couple of subtly erotic ones that rely on clichéd symbols like oysters.

Overall favorite lines, from the start of “Manchester”:

Queen of the cotton cities,
nightly I piece you back into existence:

the frayed bridal train your chimneys lay
and the warped applause-track of Victorian rain.

You’re the blackened lung whose depths I plumb,
the million windows and the smoke-occluded sun.

[James Tingle · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really strong debut poetry book from a few years back and I think he has another one out now that I've yet to read. The poems are very neatly crafted and are very elegant and concise and never overstay their welcome which I liked. Some nice imagery evoked within these pages and the poems feel as if they have been well thought through and written with a lot of care and attention...overall a clean, crisp and cultured first collection.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Opens with a great poem about my home city: 'Manchester'.

[Kate · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unfortunately I did not like any of the poems in this collection, but I did like the style. Something about his writing makes me want to read more of his work.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full of beautiful imagery and inspiring works. Thoroughly enjoyable, and would recommend to any poetry fan.

[Gerald Mills · Rating 4 out of 5]

I truly enjoyed this