This is Adam O’Riordan’s first full-length collection but his name may already be familiar. A fair few of the poems printed here have previously found their way into pamphlets, anthologies and magazines, he has picked up a couple of prizes, and he co-edited a selection of the late Michael Donaghy’s critical prose published last year. Moreover, laudatory quotes on the book’s covers by Simon Armitage, Hugo Williams and Adam Foulds underline the sense of a (well connected) young poet whose arrival has been anticipated for some time.

The volume’s arresting opening poem, ‘Manchester’, sees the dreaming poet trying to reconstruct his home town in its Victorian heyday, when it was the ‘Queen of the cotton cities’. But among the evocations of chimneys and street urchins, the poem is aurally alive to something suspect in this ‘gas-lit’ vision – ‘You’re the blackened lung whose depths I plumb’ – and the speaker awakens into the awareness that what he seeks to remake is ‘pure curio’, the dead-fleshed simulacra of  ‘a taxidermist’s diorama’.

This bittersweet pull of the past, the desire for recovery and the confrontation of its discontents, is replayed in the fine triptych of sonnets that follows, ‘Vanishing Points’. In the first of these, the story behind a photograph is unpacked. Future travails, such as a son awaking each night ‘to a friend’s screams from inside a burning tank’, cast a shadow back upon the image of a family in front of some beach huts in 1930. This, however, leads the speaker to view the poem itself as ‘a camera’, saving something in the face of time’s vicissitudes, which he lifts ‘like a bible for an oath’.

Such poetic faith seems to underwrite the confidence with which the second sonnet then reaches back to a long-dead Gaelic speaking relative, through the account of him or her in an Edwardian ancestor’s surviving letter to his daughter on her wedding night. The poem takes on the diction and syntax of the reporting Edwardian:

How you procured medicines for childhood diseases,

at wakes would carry your hospitality to extravagance,

and never spoke English with any satisfaction.

But this formal tone operates in counterpoint to a fragment of Gaelic (‘your word for liquor, usquebaugh’) that the poet rolls around his mouth with a certain Burnsian (not to mention Heaneyesque) relish: ‘You are distilled before you disappear forever/ like the raised glass, the sunlight on one last golden measure’. The sonnet becomes ‘a moment’s monument’ (as in the phrase from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wonderful sonnet on the sonnet), miraculously holding in its lines something of this vanished figure through the appropriation of this unfamiliar language and register.

The comforts of this moment of familial possession, however, are then nicely tipped off balance in the third sonnet. An addressee visits a trade union college in Dunfermline to educate ‘shop-stewards bussed in from Glasgow’ (there is an interesting political undercurrent to quite a few of his poems). But he finds the college unsettlingly ‘familiar’. A realisation dawns that he has been here before, when his mother lifted him:

by the elbows to point out

the room where she first came into the world.

Ashen-faced at the bar, the foreman stands you another round:

I seen that wreck of yours outside, son, you’ve no spot like this now.

Place and memory suddenly disturb rather than bolster identity; the wrong, altogether too affluent, roots come into view. A seemingly vanished point from the past resurfaces to trouble the living flesh (‘ashen-faced’), ironically offering the only moment where the past gets close to appearing In the Flesh.

This subtle interest in the limits of poetry’s revivifying capabilities recurs throughout the collection. But the title also resonates with some poems that enter into desire’s possession of (and desire to possess) the flesh. Several of these take considerable risks, not least in containing a heady erotic charge. ‘Dressing’ sees the poet observing a lover preparing herself for the day ahead:

You turn on the lamp and in its glow begin:

Cashmere, Touche Éclat, Kohl, Clinique,

a rose petal tincture dabbed onto your cheeks

As this watched figure dons her commodified mask, the speaker admits that the waking world ‘dulls what claims I thought I had’. Yet the poem still tries to cling on to something of this woman through a complex and suitably strained analogy: ‘Holding the sun’s gaze, / the house articulates you perfectly’. These closing lines hold in play the desire for a love poetry of perfect possession, yet are surely shadowed by the irony that a house can, of course, articulate nothing at all.

For all these successes, the volume contains some weak material, evidence of a voice very much still in development. ‘Home’, a sequence of sonnets written while poet-in-residence at the Wordsworth Trust, attempts to inter-cut imagined moments from the life of William and Dorothy Wordsworth with more modern, sometimes shocking, spots of time. But it ends up feeling both contrived and uncontrolled, adding up to less than the sum of its parts, with the sonnet form becoming strangely deadened (and uninterested in its own sonnetness). There are also quite a few poems here that have the whiff of the poetry workshop exercise. ‘Portrait of a Cooper Beech’, for instance, reads as little more than a piece of (albeit quite elegant) Wallace Stevens pastiche:

A handsome man’s laughter

          as he dresses

   for the cocktail hour.

                      *

          In the breeze

         the bellied sail

          on a schooner.

So this debut is not quite a precociously complete performance, in the manner of say Simon Armitage’s Zoom or Paul Muldoon’s New Weather. But at his best, O’Riordan has a distinctive and assured voice, capable of being both elegiac and erotic, yet aware of the moment when tribute or recollection might turn into something more disconcerting.

Adam O’Riordan, In the Flesh, Chatto & Windus, 2010.  £10.  978-0-701185-05-3

© Tom Walker, 2010

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.