Kirjahaku

Harold Hart Crane was born in Ohio in 1899. In 1923 he became a copy-writer in New York. White Buildings, his first collection, appeared in 1926, and in 1930 his most famous work, The Bridge, was published. A reaction against the pessimism in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, The Bridge was a love song to the myth of America and its optimism a much needed boon to post-Wall Street Crash America. Hart Crane committed suicide in 1932.

In a series of timeless and modern-day renditions, Maurice Riordan brilliantly introduces us to the poems that founded Ireland's rich literature. Memorable and accessible, these early lyrics are presented in their classic incarnations by literary giants from both sides of the Irish Sea: in examples by W. H. Auden, Flann O'Brien, Alfred Lord Tennyson, John Montague, Robert Graves and Frank O'Connor. But the anthology is much more than a survey of canonical texts; through a series of specially commissioned poems, fresh eyes are brought to bear on these ancient poems: by Seamus Heaney and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, by Paul Muldoon and Kathleen Jamie, by Ciaran Carson and Christopher Reid, and many others. The experience is enhanced still further by the enabling hand of Riordan himself, in a sweep of exquisite translations of his own made especially for this publication. Unforgettable and inspirational, a book for giving and for keeping: The Finest Music by some of the art-form's finest players.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE POETRY PIGOTT PRIZE IN ASSOCIATION WITH LISTOWEL WRITERS' WEEKThroughout these poems, with their roaming sense of first-person, there is depth at work where the speakers' minds are cavernous and echoic, primal and sophisticated, observant and raw, in and out of control of themselves. The effect is thrilling and unpredictable, at once a dark art and an illumination of unease and loss and wishfulness. The collection features disquieting songs of a mutable self alongside poignant elegies, interior journeys and subtle (and not so subtle) ripostes to the legacy of Trumpism - while elsewhere encounters with ghostly feet and tongues of fire consort with riffs on Baudelaire, Rilke and Laforgue. These poems twinkle with mischief and humour, making for a pungent and haunting read. Riordan - a poet whose strong, rippling influence is felt by all in his wake - affirms his reputation at the forefront of contemporary poetry.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE POETRY PIGOTT PRIZE IN ASSOCIATION WITH LISTOWEL WRITERS' WEEKThroughout these poems, with their roaming sense of first-person, the speakers' minds are cavernous and echoic, primal and sophisticated, observant and raw, in and out of control of themselves. The effect is unpredictable and thrilling, at once a dark art and an illumination of unease and loss and wishfulness. The collection features disquieting songs of a mutable self alongside poignant elegies, interior journeys and subtle (and not so subtle) ripostes to the legacy of Trumpism - while elsewhere encounters with ghostly feet and tongues of fire consort with riffs on Baudelaire, Rilke and Laforgue. These poems twinkle with mischief and humour, making for a pungent and haunting read. Riordan - a poet whose strong, rippling influence is felt by all in his wake - affirms his reputation at the forefront of contemporary poetry.

Jack Underwood's selection from Maurice Riordan's work over the last forty years allows us to rediscover a poet whose musicality, wit and emotional acuity rank him as a leading poet of his and any generation.Responding to the imaginative range of Riordan's preoccupations, Underwood creates a dynamic arrangement for poems rooted in particularities of time and place, yet enduring in their audacious inventions and pungent ironies. They are compelling in their immediacy, whether they evoke a childhood in rural Co. Cork, describe a remote community that has taken to the treetops to sing, or itemise the novelties and effronteries of aging. Riordan's work appears here as it demands to be read: at once contemporary and timeless, vibrant with the anxieties and pleasures of being alive in the here and now.

Language is the labyrinth we're enmeshed in, and any line of exploration we think is leading us out only adds a further strand to the entanglement. Rope presents an alluring and provocative array of insights as it follows a mind on the move, ever curious and restlessly making connections. Nuggets of wisdom, snippets of anecdote and choice quotations are collected here, signposted by suggestive shoulder notes. Together they form a kind of contemporary commonplace book, accumulating with associative loops and echoes. Across three prose sections, Maurice Riordan knots together strands including scientific inquiry, colour theory and AI, philosophy, ethics and psychoanalysis. There are instructive revelations on the art of poetry and literature - whether the 'folly of literary ambition' or the 'sinuous garland of plagiarism' - gleaned from a lifetime of reading and writing. The middle section delves into the author's personal history, evoking a childhood in rural Cork - 'I was born into a horse-drawn candlelit world' - and a 'new self' forged in fatherhood. Riordan is an intimate and jocular narrator throughout, calling upon everyone from Shakespeare to Schrödinger, Sappho to Siri to share this series of piquant and unforgettable discoveries.