The Holy Land

by riordan-maurice

At the heart of Maurice Riordan's third collection is a sequence of eighteen dramatic idylls set in rural Cork in the 1950s, in which the subdued microcosm of farm and smallholding - of boundary, townland and parish - is defined through the individual voices of the poet's father and assorted friends, farmhands and neighbours (Moss, Dan-Jo, Davey Divine, the Bo'son, Uncle Tom the Buck, the Gully). The settings of these loosely contiguous fragments almost casually define a historical community, ranging around farm and fields, through furze and ragwort, headland and plantation, haggard and Bog - tracing the immemorial scenes of traditional farming cutting drains, harvesting, fencing, potato planting, beet topping " and their close and intimate topography is recalled with a Proustian fidelity to names (the Long Field, the Kiln Field, the Small Fields, the Hill Fields, Higgs's Field, the Passage, the old Deer Park, the Orchard, the Bottom Glen)The tentative oral fluidity of these remarkable poems flickers on the borderline of prose, resolving complexities into an impression of timeless pastoral life, at once archaic yet precisely pitched in time. Other poems in The Holy Land proffer alternative forms of capture and recapture, and resemble light-sensitive plates storing and restoring what one poem refers to as 'the understory'. Thus the stilled life of 1950s rural Ireland is recreated, with echoes of classical models such as Theocritus, or of traditional Irish materials from the Fenian cycle, celebrating 'the music of what happens'. As Patrick Kavanagh wrote in his poem 'Epic': 'I have lived in important places, times when great events were who owned that half a rood of rock...'

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published February 17, 2011

Reviews

[William Bowden · Rating 4 out of 5]

A touching and eloquent elegy dedicated to Riordan’s father, the poems are filled with light and sentiment.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

This is an odd duck which perhaps I'm injust to, having come straight out of Sylvia Legris and The Things she can do in a single line but this collection felt a little flat. I feel a little guilty with that because this is a collection written following the death of Riordan's father and functions as an elegy/mourning-work for MR. It's autobiographical and of course we're in favour of that but I'm not sure where the reader sits - Riordan doesn't seem to want to drive a knife in which I suppose is permitted but I am left here wondering what I'm doing in the first place.

This is all rather down because in honesty I enjoyed my time with it, brief as it was. And it's worth reading if one has a copy to hand and a spare <60 mins. I feel a similar Muldoon sense which is rather problematic I don't wish to lump together the Irish contemporaries but I suppose I'm saying that there's the overriding feeling that he is capable of brilliant things! They're just not so much here

[Niamh Lusson · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars