POETRY IN THE FLESH

Last night, uncharacteristically, I went to a poetry reading given by a new young talent, Adam O'Riordan, who was marking the publication of his first collection of poems, "In the Flesh" at Peter Ho's bookshop, "Clerkenwell Tales" in Exmouth Market, London.

O'Riordan is a serious young man (probably made the more so by a year in Grasmere courtesy of the Wordsworth Trust) who said in answer to my question, that death, preservation, erasure - the subjects or undercurrents of a number of his poems - were often the focus of youth, pointing out that Eliot wrote "Prufrock" when he was only 22. He (O'Riordan) was therefore not drawn by the reiteration of my mother's comment that Wordsworth would have been the best poet in the language had he had the sense to die young!

As I wrote to Peter Ho, directly after the event, I was led to musing about how O'Riordan's father felt (or possible feels) about him. We gathered from the introduction and also from one of the poems in the book, that O'Riordan père was something of a trade unionist - a teacher of shop stewards or some such - whereas his son is an Oxford educated (Brasenose) poet without, at least as far as his writings betray, any strong political leanings.

Anyway, leaving those musings aside, I do commend the book and I'll leave O'Riordan, appropriately, with les derniers mots - here the last two lines of a brief poem about preparing and eating oysters:

I swallow an ocean into silence and peristalsis,
it hangs like a four-letter word in my gullet.