Faber & Faber

The Holy Land: Maurice Riordan

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Synopsis:

At the heart of Maurice Riordan's third collection of poems is a sequence of dramatic idylls set in rural Cork in the 1950s, in which the subdued microcosm of farm and smallholding - of boundary, townland and parish - is brought quietly to life through the voices of the poet's father, neighbours and assorted farmhands (Moss, Dan-Jo, Davey Divine, the Bo'son, Uncle Tom the Buck, the Gully).

Ranging through an intimate topography of headland and plantation, bog and haggard, these deceptively casual poems stage the rituals of traditional farming life (cutting drains, harvesting, fencing, potato drilling, beet topping), while calling to mind topical and intractable disputes about territory and water.

Summoning an archaic past, with echoes of classical models such as Theocritus, and of traditional Irish materials from the Fenian cycle, these idylls nevertheless call into presence a precarious historical community precisely realised in time, just as their tentative oral fluidity flickers provocatively on the borderline of prose. The patient and elegiac activity of The Holy Land resembles a collection of light-sensitive plates, storing and restoring what one poem calls the understory, celebrating 'the music of what happens'.

Tags:

Categorised as:

Poetry

Sub-categories:

Poetry Collections

Genres & Themes:

Community; Farming; Landscape

Awards & Prizes:

Michael Hartnett Poetry Award - Winner 2007