{"id":2619,"date":"2022-12-08T17:05:20","date_gmt":"2022-12-08T17:05:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2619"},"modified":"2023-01-04T20:46:29","modified_gmt":"2023-01-04T20:46:29","slug":"maurice-riordan-shoulder-tap-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2619","title":{"rendered":"Maurice Riordan, Shoulder Tap – review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maurice Riordan\u2019s subtly wrought Shoulder Tap<\/em> draws beauty and wide imaginative reach as much from what it doesn\u2019t say as from what it does. Its very quietness makes faint inflections and shifts of tone seem rich with implication. And a tendency to self-effacement, even when ostensibly talking about himself, seems to reflect the poet\u2019s imaginative receptiveness. His \u2018I\u2019 becomes a medium of perception rather than a centre of attention, fading into things he sees or remembers. These things may be concrete experiences, or hauntings by other writers or singers. Such hauntings are sometimes explicit and extended, like a fine translation of Baudelaire\u2019s \u2018La Charogne\u2019 and a poem \u2018after Laforgue\u2019, sometimes obvious but glancing, and sometimes the faintest of elusive undertones. Allusions of the latter kind find an apt metaphor in the \u2018shoulder tap\u2019 of the title poem.<\/p>\n

However, Riordan\u2019s receptiveness and self-effacement never involve a loss of artistic control. More than a medium of perception he\u2019s a medium of balance between opposing ways of responding to the same perceptions. He attunes the cadences of natural speech to an apparently effortless formality. This lets him engage us intimately while remaining detached and noncommittal, and that in turn allows a remarkable shimmering between tones.<\/p>\n

\u2018Gravel\u2019 is an outstanding example of this:<\/p>\n

Gravel
\nfor Frank<\/em><\/p>\n

I, too, will spend an hour playing with the gravel.
\nSorting and cleaning it. It does love the dirt.
\nDead leaves, grit, seeds that can sprout. And it hides
\nthe odd slug or worm. We can\u2019t be having that!
\nSome of these stones have come a great distance.<\/p>\n

I can no longer tell which are from Uist or Orkney.
\nAnd there\u2019s one came from a mountain in Sarawak.
\nCould it be this basalt with a twinkle of schist?
\nA shame. It\u2019s somehow joined the rabble tipped
\nhere one morning from the Travis Perkins lorry.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m acting the snob! Each and every anonymous stone
\nhas its captive soul, its own fixed little being.
\nAnd stones are time travellers. They start out in lake or esker,
\nor on the seafloor having housed small creatures.
\nThe very tips of the Himalayas are limestone.<\/p>\n

All these mute souls, who can tell their journeys …
\nHow can I be their god! I\u2019m too bald to be a saviour.
\nThough for an hour we\u2019ll sift them through our hands.
\nEach one \u2013 like the last poems of Celan \u2013 born dark.
\nEach one condemned for the duration of the earth.<\/p>\n

The overt occasion is trivial: the speaker is sifting the old gravel on his drive. As the poem develops, however, it leads us with wonderful lightness through small personal memories to vast perspectives of geological and cosmological time, and implicit metaphysical speculations on the value of existence. It does so in a way that hovers between profundity and play, like Andrew Marvell in the famous \u2018To His Coy Mistress\u2019. Already in the opening sentence, \u2018I, too, will spend an hour playing with the gravel\u2019, its solemn pacing makes it seem fraught with not-yet-revealed implications, but \u2018playing with the gravel\u2019 hints at an ironic and jokey reading. The whole poem strikes me as a beautifully constructed echo chamber, a whispering gallery of voices, some clear \u2013 like the echoes of the Pythagorean ideas in Nerval\u2019s \u2018Vers Dor\u00e9s\u2019 in the third stanza\u00a0 – some more elusive, hovering below the threshold of consciousness like a word one struggles to remember. Crucially, Riordan lets the reader decide how seriously to take all this. In the end he imagines himself as God at the Last Judgement, deciding which souls \u2013 or stones \u2013 shall be saved and which thrown away, or rather protests that he can\u2019t be God because he\u2019s too bald to be a saviour! The whole poem is like the Duck Rabbit drawing, but what makes it simultaneously disturbing and consoling is that as reader you experience the gravity, the humour and the absurdity together in a continual oscillation.<\/p>\n

The poem as deftly constructed mobile shimmering in a breeze of changing responses perhaps reaches its apogee in \u2018Slatterns\u2019, a brilliant found poem composed of quotations from a catalogue for an art exhibition. Seven sentences imbue the almost banal factualism of what they actually say with a melancholy developing from their fragmentariness: torn out of context, their feeling of incompleteness heightened by their lack of full stops, they seem to reach across the page in a vain search for the connections that would give them meaning.\u00a0 The last two present a startling shift and are the more insidiously moving for their deadpan tone:<\/p>\n

The figures stirred in me an inexplicable sense of identification<\/p>\n

& I found, to my surprise, I was weeping<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Maurice Riordan, Shoulder Tap<\/em>, 72pp, \u00a314.99 hardback, Faber & Faber Ltd.<\/p>\n

I would like to thank Ann and Peter Sansom and Suzannah Evans for permission to post this extract from my review of books by Maurice Riordan, Threa Almontaser<\/a> and Tua Forsstr\u00f6m<\/a> in issue 68 of The North, and Maurice Riordan and the Faber permissions department for permission to quote \u2018Gravel\u2019 in full on my website.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maurice Riordan\u2019s subtly wrought Shoulder Tap draws beauty and wide imaginative reach as much from what it doesn\u2019t say as from what it does. Its very quietness makes faint inflections and shifts of tone seem rich with implication. And a tendency to self-effacement, even when ostensibly talking about himself, seems to reflect the poet\u2019s imaginative […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[192],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-maurice-riordan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2619"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2619"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2619\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2642,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2619\/revisions\/2642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}