Description
Book SynopsisAt 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 life: cutting drains, harvesting, fencing, potato planting, beet topping â 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
Trade Review
"'A poet of fine intelligence and winning charm.' Times Literary Supplement 'Riordan's is a quiet, insinuating voice that never strains after its effects, but lets the words speak for themselves.' Michael Glover, Independent"
