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In the Flesh

The poems in O’Riordan’s debut collection seek to fuse aspects of the Romantic imagination with themes of sexuality, political identity and social history. The book’s central sonnet sequence Home re-imagines the lives of William and Dorothy Wordsworth with a series of meditations on possessions of theirs - such the double washstand they shared – which are housed at the Wordsworth Trust where O’Riordan worked for a year as poet in residence. To better establish the texture of the Wordsworth’s domestic life and their intellectual hinterland he conducted a series of interviews with Pamela Woof, editor of Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals. The sequence uses a sonnet with a distinctive narrative element: a response to Kevin Walzer’s critical study The Ghost of Tradition: Expansive Poetry and Postmodernism while the poems engage with cultural geographies, memory and trauma earlier explored by W.G.Sebald in his prose travelogue The Rings of Saturn and his novel Austerlitz. The sequence Vanishing Points adds to a line of Irish and Hiberno-Scots writers influenced by Romanticism. Seamus Heaney’s sequence Clearances from The Haw Lantern formed a key influence alongside the poems in Don Paterson’s Landing Light. Further developing this line the poem Goooogle seeks to meld a Keatsian melancholy with dystopian postmodernism and the topoi of science fiction embodied in JG Ballard’s The Terminal Beach and Michael Hollqubeq La Possibilité d'une île. Research for this book was supported by a Writers Award from the Arts Council England and an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. Poems from the collection have been widely anthologized and broadcast on national radio and television. In the Flesh won a Somerset Maugham Award in 2010