Contemporary Authors

• The Shape of the Dance: Essays, Interviews and Digressions Picador (London, England), 2009
• In the Flesh ( poetry collection) Chatto & Windus (London, England), 2010
• The Burning Ground ( short stories) W. W. Norton & Company (New York, NY), 2017
• A Herring Famine ( poetry collection) Chatto & Windus (London, England), 2017

1. The burning ground LCCN 2016059314 Type of material Book Personal name O'Riordan, Adam, 1982-, author. Uniform title Short stories. Selections Main title The burning ground / Adam O'Riordan. Edition First American edition. Published/Produced New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2017] Projected pub date 1707 Description pages cm ISBN 9780393239553 (hardcover) Library of Congress Holdings Information not available. 2. A herring famine LCCN 2016436948 Type of material Book Personal name O'Riordan, Adam, 1982- author. Uniform title Poems. Selections Main title A herring famine / Adam O'Riordan. Published/Produced London : Chatto & Windus, an imprint of Vintage, 2017. ©2017 Description 72 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 0701187972 9780701187972 CALL NUMBER PR6065.R684 A6 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 3. In the flesh LCCN 2010467841 Type of material Book Personal name O'Riordan, Adam, 1982- Main title In the flesh / Adam O'Riordan. Published/Created London : Chatto & Windus, 2010. Description 49 p. ; 22 cm. ISBN 9780701185053 (pbk.) 0701185058 (pbk.) Shelf Location FLS2014 094758 CALL NUMBER PR6065.R684 I67 2010 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS1) 4. In the flesh : poems LCCN 2015028386 Type of material Book Personal name O'Riordan, Adam, 1982- author. Uniform title Poems. Selections (In the flesh) Main title In the flesh : poems / Adam O'Riordan. Edition First American edition. Published/Produced New York ; London : W. W. Norton & Company, 2015. ©2010 Description 49 pages ; 21 cm ISBN 9780393345728 (softcover) CALL NUMBER PR6065.R684 A6 2015 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 5. The shape of the dance : essays, interviews and digressions LCCN 2010362997 Type of material Book Personal name Donaghy, Michael, 1954-2004. Main title The shape of the dance : essays, interviews and digressions / Michael Donaghy ; edited by Adam O'Riordan and Maddy Paxman. Published/Created London : Picador, 2009. Description xiii, 203 p. : ill. ; 21 cm. ISBN 9780330456289 (hbk.) 0330456288 (hbk.) CALL NUMBER PS3554.O4635 S485 2009 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Adam O'Riordan - http://www.adamoriordan.com/biography.html

  BIOGRAPHY
  Adam O’Riordan was born in Manchester in 1982 and read English at Oxford University. In 2008 O’Riordan became the youngest Poet-in-Residence at The Wordsworth Trust, the Centre for British Romanticism. His first collection In the Flesh (Chatto and Windus) won a Somerset Maugham Award in 2011. He is Lecturer in Poetry Writing at the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University.

• The Story Prize - blog - http://thestoryprize.blogspot.com/2017/06/adam-oriordan-and-impulse-to-write-prose.html

  QUOTE:
  Spending time in America—in New York and then Los Angeles—is what moved me from writing poetry, which is where I began, into writing prose. The plurality of the place, the patent sense of possibility, the promise of it and the way in which promises are broken there all conspired to make me into a writer of prose. And glad I am they did.

  Wednesday, June 28, 2017
  Adam O'Riordan and the Impulse to Write Prose
  In the fifth in a series of posts on 2017 books entered for The Story Prize, Adam O'Riordan, author of The Burning Ground (W.W. Norton & Company), discusses what led him from poetry to fiction and how he approaches his work.

  What influenced you to a write short fiction?
  Spending time in America—in New York and then Los Angeles—is what moved me from writing poetry, which is where I began, into writing prose. The plurality of the place, the patent sense of possibility, the promise of it and the way in which promises are broken there all conspired to make me into a writer of prose. And glad I am they did.

  Describe your writing habits.
  I try to write on the majority of working days, so three days writing in any given week will be a good week for me. If something is going well, I’ll write on weekends, too, both Saturday and Sunday. I usually write for around three hours and always in the morning, from about 9 a.m. after coffee until 12 p.m. when I start to want to eat lunch. If something is going really well, I’ll write again in the evening from 6 p.m. until 9 p.m. or from 7 p.m. until 10 p.m. For me, it’s about getting runs of days together. That’s when things start to happen.

  Where do you do your best work?

  SoCal beach: Running into ideas
  Without exception, my clearest ideas have come to me while running along the stretch of sand from Venice Beach to the Santa Monica pier; the mixture of sunlight, sea air, the vast space out to sea and big crowds nearby on the boardwalk. Though these days, it is only an annual or biannual pleasure at best. Here in Manchester, England, where I live, I write between a number of places: my apartment in an old cotton mill in the center of the city, the Portico Library, and Central Library. More and more these days, I write in the lobby or the bar of the Principal Hotel, another grand Edwardian building from when the city was in its pomp—lots of space and friendly waiters and waitresses. I like to arrive early as the guests are finishing breakfast and be on the edge of that sleepy, pleasantly displaced and transient energy that always seems so full of potential.

  Name something by another author that you wish you’d written.
  "The Dead" by James Joyce, the final story in his collection Dubliners. A story so full of rich life and sadness, so grounded in the detail and lived experience of a place, yet rising above and beyond it right out into the eternal.

  Where does a story begin for you?
  With an urge, sometimes in the form of an image or a phrase, sometimes in the form of a voice, a voice that might be trying to work something out or arrive at some form of clarity about something, after which comes, on my part, a desire at first to hear it or, if it’s an image, see it as clearly as I can and then to elaborate on it, to invent and to embroider. To take a good look around the life that I’ve found.

  How do you know when a story is finished?
  I think it’s perhaps a question of density—at the end of the story when it’s done, I’ll be feeling denser or lighter depending on the kind of story it is. I suppose by the end I’m often feeling sadder too.

  Describe a physical, mental, or spiritual practice that helps put you in a suitable state of mind to write.
  Listening to music is often a good preparative; physical, mental, and spiritual in one. Philip Glass or Max Richter, things like William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops hitting that same note of trance-like melancholy over and over, which you notice and then don’t notice.

  How do you get yourself back on track when your writing isn’t going well?
  Little by little, day by day. A few minutes at a time at first, until it takes again and some sort of rhythm is rediscovered and you ride it for as long as you can until life usually intervenes and then it's back to getting going again.

  Describe an idea that you want to write or return to that you haven’t quite figured out yet.
  Autumn, 1934, a shy man, careworn and a little run to fat, somewhere in late middle age, named Wallace, is driving a Chevrolet Open Tourer he has rebuilt from scrap, from Caddo, Oklahoma, to the Great Lakes. He is looking for his father.

  Describe your reading habits.
  I try, whenever I can, to give an hour from any given day over to reading, usually in the late afternoon —and sometimes at night for twenty minutes or so I’ll read aloud or I will be read to—I think this is probably the most intimate form of luxury known to man.
  Posted by Larry Dark at 1:56 PM
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  Labels: 2017 contributor posts, Adam O'Riordan

• London Review of Books - https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/adam-oriordan

  QUOTE:
  On the strength of the collection taken as a whole, I’m even inclined - for once - to agree with the publisher’s hype
  Adding to that list of superlatives, I’d also call his stuff jaunty, vibrant, and satisfyingly disorienting
  SUBSCRIBER-ONLY
  Adam O’Riordan
  Adam O’Riordan’s first collection of poems, In the Flesh, won a Somerset Maugham Award in 2011. He teaches creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.

• Ben Wilkinson - http://www.benwilkinson.org/2010/05/adam-oriordan-in-flesh_25.html

  6.6.10
  Adam O'Riordan, In the Flesh

  This year looks like it’s shaping up to be an interesting one for new British poetry. There are several exciting debuts that have recently been released or are shortly forthcoming, not least Sam Willetts’s New Light for the Old Dark, which I mentioned here a couple of months back, Miriam Gamble’s The Squirrels are Dead, a first book of rhythmically taut poems that, if the stuff of hers I’ve spotted in magazines and elsewhere is anything to go by, will include lyrics and narratives from animal and curiously alien perspectives, and, of course, Dan Wyke’s long awaited debut with Waterloo, whose subtly suggestive poems address the domestic, familial and everyday with knowing insight.

  One book I’m particularly looking forward to, though, is the first full collection from Adam O’Riordan. Titled In the Flesh and due to appear from Chatto & Windus this July, it follows on from a pamphlet, Queen of the Cotton Cities, published by tall-lighthouse in 2007 as one of the first in its acclaimed Pilot series, and winner of an Eric Gregory Award. A short volume of only sixteen poems, this pamphlet was the first introduction readers got to O’Riordan’s work, but it leaves a lasting impression: lyrical, thematically wide-ranging and Donaghy-like in its formal panache, the poems combine dazzling metaphor and simile with sudden shifts in perspective and detailed, provocative contemplation.

  Having read an early proof, I’d certainly say that In the Flesh builds on this early promise, including many new longer poems and a sequence of sonnets, ‘Home’, which imagine episodes from the lives of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, inspired by O’Riordan’s time as the Wordsworth Trust’s Poet-in-Residence at Dove Cottage. On the strength of the collection taken as a whole, I’m even inclined - for once - to agree with the publisher’s hype, which describes O’Riordan’s poems as “confident, seductive, and thrillingly assured […] seeking familiarity in a world of ‘false trails and disappearing acts’ […] in language both clear-eyed and sensuous”. Adding to that list of superlatives, I’d also call his stuff jaunty, vibrant, and satisfyingly disorienting: take vignette ‘NGC3949’, below, as an example of his ability to marry incongruous subjects in atmospheric and convincing conceits. And since it's often interesting to hear a writer's own thoughts about their work, as well as a bit of background, Adam answers a couple of questions below.

  NGC3949

  is a galaxy in Ursa Major whose formation mirrors, almost exactly, that of our own.

  Back from the perforated dark and growing distance,
  Hubble’s milky image brings us to ourselves.

  The echo pitched up from the moss-wet well:
  a lover’s shape, that indelible stain on the iris.

  (Years down the line, you swear blind
  the cut and sway of a dark form is her.

  Neon dazzles the rain-slicked street
  as you wave away the cab and push

  back down through the crowd into the bar,
  pilot charting the wrong star by candlelight,

  leagues off course, the face, of course, is another’s.)
  In this spiral galaxy the arms embrace the core.

  Not her – or your idea of her – and never will be.
  It doesn’t matter how beautiful your guess is.

  © Adam O'Riordan, reproduced by permission of the poet

  BW: One of the first things readers will notice about In the Flesh is a strong sense of place threaded through the collection: Manchester, the Lake District, specific locations such as a college window in Cambridge or an escalator in Paris. Can you tell us a little about your background, upbringing, and what we might call your 'imaginative hinterland', and how you see these as contributing to your writing?

  AOR: I was born in Didsbury in South Manchester.

  My father’s family were from Scotland. His father was a third generation Irish immigrant and the third generation in public service, in his a case as a career naval officer. His mother from Fife, what you might call, haute-bourgeoisie. She was a descendant of Sir Michael Nairn, the linoleum manufacturer who took his father’s floor-cloth business and industrialized the process.

  My mother’s family were a mix English, Scottish, and Irish. Her father’s family had come down from Aberdeen where they worked in the fisheries to work in the newly built Trafford Park, the world’s first planned industrial estate. Family legend has it they sailed down on board a fishing boat during the herring famine.

  My father worked in Trade Union education, in fact he met my mother when they both at the same college. They were both active in the Labour party and for a period my mother ran the office of our local MP.

  I was the first generation on my father’s side to go to a State school, but the fourth or fifth to go to Oxbridge.

  I suppose these factors made me acutely aware of class and identity but also the fluidity of both. Leaving me feeling not particularly at home, or too uncomfortable, in any.

  I remember my father telling me about an exercise called ‘Dig Where You Stand’ from a book of the same name by a Swedish historian Sven Lindqvist which encouraged workers to re-discover their history.

  My poem ‘A Trade Union College’ from the ‘Vanishing Points’ sequence recalls a story my father told me about teaching a group of shop stewards as a young man and carrying out the exercise. Part way through he realized that the college they were in had once been a rather grand private house and was the place his mother was born. Though apparently they didn’t give him too hard a time about it.

  The other poems in the sequence looks at similar themes – flux and change and forgetting of identity. The poem ‘A Wedding Letter’ takes a note written by the son of my last Gaelic speaking ancestor on the night of his daughter’s wedding in 1906. He describes in a wonderfully Edwardian way how she ‘would carry her hospitality to extravagance’ and ‘never spoke English with any satisfaction’.

  It occurred to me in reading the letter that once it was lost or forgotten that the woman (my great great great grandmother) would vanish. It was that chilling sense of erasure coupled with the privilege of being perhaps one of the last to catch a glimpse of her in that description.

  BW: That title, In the Flesh, captures well the blurrings between the sensual and the violent, the physically beautiful and the rawly animal, which much of your work centres on. Do you see this as an especially contemporary concern?

  AOR: I think it’s always been there. Certainly in the lines and traditions I respect and have learned from: think of Yeats’s Leda and the Swan with that ‘’sudden blow / the great wings beating still’.

  I always loved that line in Romeo and Juliet where Mercutio, in a lovely coupling of the two, describes Tybalt as ‘the very butcher of a silk button’.

  I remember when I was in residence at The Wordsworth Trust showing my collection in progress to Pamela Woof, the president of the Trust and academic. She wrote a note to me talking about ‘the nearness of violence to beauty, of beauty to the vulnerable’ which I think captures it.

  I struggled with the title for a long time. I wanted something that suggests not just the blurrings of sensual and violent you mention but also a sense of presence and absence and the familia. I think ‘In the Flesh’ ties it all together quite well.

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QUOTE:
It's a work that feels fully lived-in. O'Riordan's attention to precise details helps make these stories
memorable; at their best, they put familiar scenarios in a new light.

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Print Marked Items
O'Riordan, Adam: THE BURNING
GROUND
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
O'Riordan, Adam THE BURNING GROUND Norton (Adult Fiction) $25.95 7, 18 ISBN: 978-0-393-
23955-3
British poet O'Riordan (A Herring Famine, 2017, etc.) makes his fiction debut with a collection of stories
set in the U.S.Whether he's writing about travelers arriving there after a long journey or the complex lives
of longtime residents, O'Riordan's stories largely center on Los Angeles. By and large, these are subtle
fictions, works in which mannerisms and casual gestures count for a lot. The first tale, "A Thunderstorm in
Santa Monica," sets the tone for the rest of the book: it's about the connections made by lovers and the
connections made by strangers, and absent figures and physical spaces play a significant part in how the
story unfolds. There are a few horrific moments in the book: a hate crime referred to in passing in "Rambla
Pacifico" and a sense of wrongness woven through with memory that leads "'98 Mercury Sable" to a
haunting climax. A number of the stories involve characters struggling with the passage of time. The artist
at the center of the title story notes that "the years in California had temporarily abated the agonies of
ageing," while the protagonist of "Wave-Riding Giants" recalls a weekly meal at the senior housing in
which he lives: "uniform slices of ice-cream-pink meat marbled with white fat laid out on trestle tables."
The collection's high point is "The El Segundo Blue Butterfly," which traces the overlapping lives and
shifting fortunes of a journalist and the businessman he interviews repeatedly over the course of his career.
It's a work that feels fully lived-in. O'Riordan's attention to precise details helps make these stories
memorable; at their best, they put familiar scenarios in a new light.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"O'Riordan, Adam: THE BURNING GROUND." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491934262/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d38b05dc.
Accessed 27 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491934262
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QUOTE:
illustrates much of what
is wrong with poetry in the UK. These poems are both unethical and boring, sadistic and genteel,
unambitious and yet pretentious. Almost every one of them has been occasioned by a stranger's suffering
and/or death.
Like a ghoulish Forrest Gump, O'Riordan always seems to pop up in the right place at the right time to
appropriate the misery.

Where it hurts
Paul Batchelor
New Statesman.
146.5375 (July 14, 2017): p47.
COPYRIGHT 2017 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
Night Sky with Exit Wounds
Ocean Vuong
Jonathan Cape, 79pp, 10 [pounds sterling]
A Herring Famine
Adam O'Riordan
Chatto & Windus, 72pp. 10 [pounds sterling]
Selected Poems
Colette Bryce
Picador, 117pp. 14.99 [pounds sterling]
Not yet 30 years old, Ocean Vuong has already won several major awards in the US for his debut collection
Night Sky with Exit Wounds. It's easy to see why. From its opening lines ("In the body, where everything
has a price, / I was a beggar"), the book brims with precise, surreal, erotic imagery: "The dress / petaling off
him like the skin / of an apple." Vuong authoritatively lays claim to a range of symbols and tropes: hands
and guns; words and stars; bodies kneeling and falling; petals and clothes or skin. None of these images and
associations is unfamiliar, but we see them afresh--as one poem puts it: "Look, my eyes are not / your eyes."
This is primarily because Vuong possesses a large and unusual imagination, but the road he has taken to
poetry is also a factor: he was born in Vietnam and emigrated to the US after a spell in a refugee camp; he is
also gay. Being a Trump-voter's worst nightmare seems to have provided him with a unique and often comic
perspective on Western language and life:
A pillaged village is a fine example of
perfect rhyme. He said that.
He was white. Or maybe, I was just
beside myself, next to him.
Either way, I forgot his name by heart.
Inevitably, given its ambition, this is an uneven collection. Some poems are overwhelmed by their subjects
(in particular a mawkish poem about 9/11), and Vuong sometimes falls short in his reach for the grand
Rilkean note. In "Into the Breach" the speaker asks: "But what if I broke through / the skin's thin page /
anyway / & found the heart / not the size of a fist / but your mouth opening / to the width of Jerusalem.
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What then?" To which the reader can only say, well, what then indeed? But these lines are immediately
followed by a more subtly ambiguous observation: "To love another/ man--is to leave / no one behind / to
forgive me. /1 want to leave / no one behind." Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a remarkable debut. Where
Vuong is headed is anyone's guess, but you'll want to go with him.
In unhappy contrast, A Herring Famine, Adam O'Riordan's second book of poems, illustrates much of what
is wrong with poetry in the UK. These poems are both unethical and boring, sadistic and genteel,
unambitious and yet pretentious. Almost every one of them has been occasioned by a stranger's suffering
and/or death.
Like a ghoulish Forrest Gump, O'Riordan always seems to pop up in the right place at the right time to
appropriate the misery. Farm labourers, rioting prisoners, starving heroin addicts, W B Yeats--all owe God a
death and Adam a poem. Take, for example, "Catalunya", a three-part poem: the first part is about a random
murder; the second is about getting some trim on holiday; the third is about staring moodily at the sea. How
do the parts "speak" to one another? They don't. Or there's "Inner Harbor", a poem that begins by telling us
how Baltimore has had "two hundred / recent murders", and then recounts some of the grislier details,
before settling down to its actual subject: a dinner date with Andrew Motion. All of these deaths, and the
many more in this book, are invoked for no other reason than to make the poet's dreary self-fascination
seem significant. Line-breaks are often arbitrary, poems fall in and out of rhythm, and the syntax is
repetitive, overusing the "x of y" construction as a shortcut to sounding poetic: "a smur of butter", "the
hutch-stink of the soul", "the tender vellum / of his hand". It's dire.
Colette Bryce's Selected Poems assembles a body of work distinguished by the subtle, haunting music of its
lilting yet short-breathed lines. "A Spider" begins: "I trapped a spider in a glass, / a fine-blown wine glass..."
Characteristically, Bryce gives each syllable its due, sensitising the reader's ear. The poem ends:
I meant to let it go
but still he taps against the glass
all Marcel Marceau
in the wall that is there and not there,
a circumstance I know.
Whether it is drawn from Bryce's experience of being a gay female poet, or of living in Britain having been
raised a Northern Irish Catholic, the poem's allegorical charge lies not so much in its content as in the way it
compels the reader to vocalise the mixture of hesitancy and inevitability by which it proceeds.
Never showy, always watchful, Bryce's poems return to the parts of personal and political life that hurt. Her
most recent work returns insistently to her childhood in Derry, with the checkpoint manned by "a teenager /
drowned in a uniform, cumbered with a gun", and soldiers searching the family home, "filling our rooms
like news of a tragedy". In "Heritance" she claims one of her characteristics as "Tact, to a point". It's a
quality that has served her poetry better than it has served her career. Bryce's excellence is hardly a secret,
but as she enters mid-career, she is yet to receive her due. Her Selected Poems should help to rectify this.
Caption: Trapped: Colette Bryce's spider taps out its lilting allegory from inside the wine glass
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Batchelor, Paul. "Where it hurts." New Statesman, 14 July 2017, p. 47. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500500753/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9bd4cd57.
Accessed 27 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A500500753
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QUOTE:
Lovers are
lost and mourned in these sharp and sometimes violent stories, and characters suffer through turbulence
both literal and metaphorical, haunted by questions they never asked.

The Burning Ground
Publishers Weekly.
264.19 (May 8, 2017): p33+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Burning Ground
Adam O'Riordan. Norton, $25.95 (224p)
ISBN 978-0-393-23955-3
The debut short story collection by O'Riordan (author of the poetry collection In the Flesh) quietly
examines the inner lives of men struggling to connect with others--family members, lovers, or even
strangers encountered briefly--against the richly symbolic backdrop of the American West Coast. In "A
Thunderstorm in Santa Monica," a man named Harvey has flown in from London to visit his occasional
lover, Teresa. But when her work requires her to leave suddenly for New York during his visit, Harvey finds
himself reaching out to his seatmate on the flight over, with whom he shared a moment of intimacy and
comfort when both men thought the plane was going down. And in a seeming homage to the Los Angeles
noir tradition, "Rambla Pacifico" follows the journey of a man named Lindstrom into the city's violent
underbelly as he investigates the disappearance of his boss's daughter. "Black Bear in the Snow" recounts a
hunting trip during which a father tries to repair a fractured relationship with his adolescent son. Lovers are
lost and mourned in these sharp and sometimes violent stories, and characters suffer through turbulence
both literal and metaphorical, haunted by questions they never asked. O'Riordan is particularly skilled at
finding the perfect image or detail to bring these worlds to life. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Burning Ground." Publishers Weekly, 8 May 2017, p. 33+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491949049/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b8701dff.
Accessed 27 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491949049

"O'Riordan, Adam: THE BURNING GROUND." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491934262/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 27 Jan. 2018. Batchelor, Paul. "Where it hurts." New Statesman, 14 July 2017, p. 47. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500500753/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 27 Jan. 2018. "The Burning Ground." Publishers Weekly, 8 May 2017, p. 33+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491949049/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 27 Jan. 2018.

• The Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/25/the-burning-ground-adam-o-riordan-review
  Word count: 931

  QUOTE:
  you are never in doubt that you are reading the work of an elegant and greatly accomplished writer whose future promises much.

  The Burning Ground by Adam O’Riordan – smoothly skilful LA stories
  Books
  A prizewinning poet makes the leap to fiction with a quietly excellent collection set among the wealth, the grime and the depleting emptiness of Los Angeles
  Adam Foulds

  Wed 25 Jan 2017 07.00 EST Last modified on Wed 29 Nov 2017 04.57 EST
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  1
  Ideal place for fiction … downtown LA at dawn.
  Sprawling under its haze, sucking in people from across America and all over the world, its gaudy luxury and prosperous suburbs in close proximity with communities immobilised by poverty and crime, Los Angeles is an ideal place for fiction. It is peopled by the madly hopeful and the horribly hopeless, with a fair sprinkling of geniuses and gangsters among those just getting by; F Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, John Fante, Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy and Joan Didion have all set novels there. To add to this welter of LA tales, we now have The Burning Ground, a quietly excellent collection of short stories set in that kaleidoscopic city, and the first prose book by the poet Adam O’Riordan.

  An epigraph from Christopher Isherwood indicates the kind of place O’Riordan’s LA will be: “Don’t cry to me for safety. There is no home here … Understand this fact, and you will be free. Accept it, and you will be happy.” The first story, “A Thunderstorm in Santa Monica”, neatly follows from this warning of homelessness. Harvey, a young British man, is spending more money than he should on flights to the city to pursue a love affair with the older, more successful Teresa. On this occasion, Teresa has had to go to New York on business and Harvey is left to his own devices. Turbulence on the flight over, Harvey’s enforced, dislocated solitude and an approaching storm together accumulate an uncomfortable atmosphere of diffuse threat and depleting emptiness in sumptuous surroundings (surely one of LA’s signature experiences).

  Felicitous without being pyrotechnic … Adam O’Riordan
  Facebook Twitter Pinterest Felicitous without being pyrotechnic … Adam O’Riordan
  The prose is smoothly effective, its skill unobtrusive. This is short story writing in the mode of William Trevor or John Cheever rather than John Updike or Denis Johnson. Phrasing is felicitous without being pyrotechnic, as when the moment of take off produces “the focused quiet of an exam hall as passengers concentrated on keeping calm and pretending what was happening was perfectly normal. The plane continued to ascend, the patchwork of fields dropping away below as London’s suburbs petered out into countryside.” This style is in harmony with stories that are often built up out of observation, with central characters who are spectators more often than actors.

  This is true of the longest, most shamelessly eventful story in the collection, “Rambla Pacifico”. Here we’re in familiar LA noir territory. Our hero, Lindstrom, is charged by his wealthy boss with the recovery of his beautiful, wayward daughter, who has been kidnapped – a plot out of Chandler or Ellroy. Lindstrom seeks the help of Jesus Porfirio, the menacing muscle who actually finds the girl and does the dirty work. With its double crosses and cynical heroes, opaque plots and fatal beauties, its high body count and sinister shadows, noir was a form in which the trauma and lingering effects of the second world war were worked through. O’Riordan is acute about this. War experience haunts the story and the violence, even when happening out of sight, is pungently nasty. O’Riordan does without noir’s intricate plotting, however. The narrative is straightforward; what the reader expects to happen does. The story’s distinctiveness lies in occasional details, the way Adella walking past “would make the air feel heavy in your lungs”, or the man falteringly playing the oboe among the group of abusers when Adella is finally found drugged and brutalised on a mattress in an abandoned factory.

  You are never in doubt that you are reading the work of an elegant and greatly accomplished writer
  The next story in the collection makes non-participation its subject. McCauley is a congenital spectator. In old age now, he recalls his war service when the dropping of the nuclear bombs in Japan meant he missed out on action in the Pacific. Later he’d become a fan of surfing but not a surfer. The incident that haunts him involves coming upon his wife apparently engaged in a threesome with two macho surfers and not interrupting them. Again, there are no twists or reversals here. McCauley recalls these events and the story ends without producing epigrammatic insight or personal redemption. The effect of this here and throughout the book is double-edged. When it works well, the stories linger in the mind as strong impressions, simultaneously complete and unresolved. When less convincing, the stories feel anecdotal and limited by their avoidance of direct confrontation. Still, you are never in doubt that you are reading the work of an elegant and greatly accomplished writer whose future promises much.

  • Adam Foulds’ The Quickening Maze is published by Vintage. The Burning Ground is published by Bloomsbury. To order a copy for £16.99 (RRP £13.49) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

• The Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/29/the-burning-ground-adam-o-riordan-review-short-stories-scorching
  Word count: 260

  QUOTE:
  lyrical debut short-story collection

  The Burning Ground by Adam O’Riordan review – scorching stories
  The poet’s first story collection conjures emotional heat from the Californian landscape
  Anita Sethi

  Sun 29 Jan 2017 06.00 EST Last modified on Sat 2 Dec 2017 10.26 EST
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  Adam O'Riordan
  The landscape of California fills this lush, lyrical debut short-story collection from poet Adam O’Riordan: eight slick stories journey from isolated towns to the bustle of Venice Beach, and down the Pacific Coast Highway. But most emotionally transporting are the inner journeys, in a collection whose epigraph is from Christopher Isherwood, calling California a “landscape which relentlessly reminds the traveller of his human condition and the circumstances of his tenure upon the earth”. Tiny, telling details portray the passage of time, and the poignancy of people losing their place in the world, such as a son recalling “the web of veins” in his grieving father’s eyes.

  The title refers not only to an actual fire, for the emotional temperature of these evocative stories is often scorching - from an artist remembering a torrid affair to characters suffering the consequences of burning their bridges. At its finest, this collection coolly captures the heat of desire.

  • The Burning Ground by Adam O’Riordan is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To order a copy for £13.49 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

• The Irish Times
  https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/the-burning-ground-review-los-angeles-stories-with-poetic-vision-1.2931915
  Word count: 1197

  QUOTE:
  The west coast of the United States is the backdrop for each of the eight stories in The Burning Ground, as immigrant Brits look for refuge and down-and-out locals seek to rebuild lives. This is an impressive range of stories that run from reflective to highly dramatic, and O’Riordan’s verbal polish as a poet shines throughout.

  The Burning Ground review: Los Angeles stories with poetic vision
  From burnt-out businessmen to a sun-scorched surfing paradise, the city comes to life in Adam O’Riordan’s debut collection

  Adam O’Riordan: The Burning Ground is an impressive range of stories, and its author’s verbal polish shines out
  Adam O’Riordan: The Burning Ground is an impressive range of stories, and its author’s verbal polish shines out

  Sarah Gilmartin

  Sat, Jan 21, 2017, 05:00

  First published:
  Sat, Jan 21, 2017, 05:00

  BUY NOW

  Book Title:
  The Burning Ground

  ISBN-13:
  978-1408864777

  Author:
  Adam O’Riordan

  Publisher:
  Bloomsbury

  Guideline Price:
  £16.99

  The personal is political in Adam O’Riordan’s debut collection, The Burning Ground. Private experiences and epiphanies happen as major world events unfold in the background. There are mentions of Walter Cronkite and the death of Michael Jackson, calls for the resignation of Slobodan Miloševic and an aeroplane crash off Galway Bay that kills 99 people.

  This latter tragedy occurs in the story Rambla Pacifico as Arthur Lindstrom, the foreman of a desert building project, finds himself dragged into California’s underworld when his employer’s daughter goes missing. With a gruff war veteran, Jesus Porfirio, as his sidekick, Lindstrom goes on a hunt for the beautiful Adella that turns into a high-octane adventure across Los Angeles. Overtones of the plot of The Big Lebowski give way to a more gruesome reality as Adella’s kidnapping highlights gang warfare in the City of Light.

  The west coast of the United States is the backdrop for each of the eight stories in The Burning Ground, as immigrant Brits look for refuge and down-and-out locals seek to rebuild lives. This is an impressive range of stories that run from reflective to highly dramatic, and O’Riordan’s verbal polish as a poet shines throughout.

  English writer and editor Robert McCrum ‘believes that in a largely secular age the words of great writers offer consolation and a way to navigate death and dying’. Photograph: Roberto Ricciuti/Getty ImagesWith the End in Mind: Dying, Death and Wisdom in an Age of Denial book review
  Claudia Roden’s The Book of Jewish Food is a history of Jewish domestic life – as well as a collection of recipesIn praise of older books: The Book of Jewish Food by Claudia Roden (1997)
  Henry David Thoreau spent two years at this now world-famous landmark and inspiration for his book Walden. Photograph: Rhythmnic QuietudeThere’s more to Henry Thoreau than the mysteries of Walden
  Bernard O’Donoghue. Image: Dearbhla KellyThe Saturday poem: Thanks though
  Black ’47 by Michael Farrell. Image courtesy of Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum, Quinnipiac University, Hamden, ConnecticutDisturbing Remains: A story of Black ’47
  Born in Manchester, O’Riordan studied English at Oxford and became the youngest writer-in-residence at the Wordsworth Trust, the centre for British romanticism. His first collection of poetry, In the Flesh, won a Somerset Maugham Award in 2011.

  From sun-scorched surfing paradises to grungy dive bars, from road trips to the city’s homeless community, LA is brought to life. In the evocative A Thunderstorm in Santa Monica Harvey, a London divorcé, has a long-distance dalliance with a big-shot film executive, Teresa. The relationship is serviceable, but what Harvey really enjoys is the downtime on the flights. Bonding with a stranger on a particularly turbulent passage, he has the sense “that humanity had prevailed and that men had faced their fate together”.

  One of the collection’s strongest stories, The El Segundo Blue Butterfly, meshes public and private as Christopher, a journalist, looks back on his career and his first, formative interview with an enigmatic businessman. From his single mother’s efforts to help her son succeed in life to Christopher’s enduring connection to the businessman, the goodness in humanity is underlined.

  There are more good intentions in Black Bear in the Snow, when Randall tries to reconnect with his teenage son, Joey, by bringing him on an ill-advised hunting trip. Sidelined by his ex-wife and her flashy lawyer husband, Randall tries to go back to nature, but his attempts do little more than show the chasm between father and son.

  Another harried father is too preoccupied with his young twins to intervene when he sees a man smack a child in a service-station car park off an interstate. The twist in the tale of 98 Mercury Sable brings a much darker ending to the narrator’s humorous story of passing his driving test while under the influence.

  It is one of two short and diverting pieces that make for an unusual close to the collection. The other is Magda’s a Dancer, which sees two British immigrant couples discuss their careers companionably and self-indulgently over drinks. Consisting entirely of dialogue, and devoid of speech tags, O’Riordan takes a risk by focusing on the expressive effects of what his characters say. The author and critic David Lodge has called this technique “staying on the surface”. O’Riordan uses it to allow dialogue to expose his characters without narrative interference.

  In Wave-Riding Giants McCauley, a lonely widower in a housing facility, confronts a long-suppressed memory of his wife, Dolores. A backdrop of surfing culture transports the reader to mid-20th century Venice Beach, where McCauley crafts boards made of white cedar for his surfing idols. The misty memories of California dreaming with Dolores disperse as he recalls finding her in a compromising position with a famous surfer and his cousin, watching “for what might have been seconds or hours at the blurred shapes the three of them made”.

  There are echoes of Ian McEwan and Graham Greene in the collection’s title story, which sees an older British artist in exile in Los Angeles after the end of an affair in London. As he settles into “life in the impossible village” the painter tries to forget Alannah and focus once more on his art, turning to the homeless population of the city for inspiration, painting, among others, an addict and “the caramels of his cashew-shaped teeth”.

  It is a haunting story that pins the personal and political together under the banner of art, with O’Riordan’s masterly imagery reminding us all the while of his own skill.

  The ground of the title ignites as a team of gardeners prunes the sunlit Californian landscape and sets fire to the debris: “Their nickelled brass brackets began to warp, the flames licking the ivory-black canvas of their pouch to vermilion, Prussian blue, yellow ochre, flake white.”

• Storgy
  https://storgy.com/2017/01/12/book-review-the-burning-ground-by-adam-oriordan/
  Word count: 3266

  QUOTE:
  ‘The Burning Ground’ has everything needed to burn up all the competition. O’Riordan’s fuel for this are his delicately told short stories, the oxygen is his powerfully emotive and intelligently woven subjects of his stories; packing the heat and which completes our fire triangle is how ‘you’ as a reader are changed, warmed and feel completed by reading them. It’s a tremendous accomplishment stepping out into a new genre and blowing up the competition, something truly brilliant exists within ‘The Burning Ground’.

  STORGY Magazine January 12, 2017 book reviews, books, Fiction, Uncategorized
  BOOK REVIEW: The Burning Ground by Adam O’Riordan
  THE BURNING GROUND by Adam O'Riordan....https://storgy.com/2017/01/12/book-review-the-burning-ground-by-adam-oriordan/
  For those of you who the name Adam O’Riordan doesn’t ring any bells then this review is for you; firstly, you are going to discover a wonderfully talented writer who is also a talented poet; who’s beautifully poignant collection ‘In the Flesh’ should be a must for your books to read in 2017; plus, you will also be discovering a gifted raconteur who is able to seamlessly move into the short story genre, flexing his undeniable talent with barely any bumps along the path.

  The anthology kicks off with the slow burning ‘A Thunderstorm in Santa Monica’ which was a gentle tease for the reader into what was and is a magnificent anthology. The story centres upon Harvey and his relationship with the elusive, attractive temptress Teresa. Harvey is our alien in LA, and if Sting’s song ‘Englishman in New York’ had been altered to ‘Englishman in LA’; you would appropriately sum up Harvey’s life; his quaint Britishness shines out of the piece, leaving him searching for somewhere to belong on those dark and lonely nights when his sole purpose for being in LA is his relationship to Teresa who as circumstances transpire ends up being on the other side of the world, back in ‘his’ England. The stories closing stages are beautifully written when we see Harvey sitting alone in a bar trying to belong and waiting for the coming storm. When you realise that not a lot happens you suddenly realise that O’Riordan has masterfully held your attention with his ability as a raconteur, he leads the reader and you can’t help but be taken along for the journey.

  ‘When they hit turbulence Harvey was sleeping. The map on the headrest screen was the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes. They were somewhere over northern Canada. The jolt was so hard it lifted him from his seat, his lap belt biting into the top of his pelvis. He glanced to his right and saw and saw Nick gripping his armrests, bracing himself against the movements of the plane. The plane was rattling harder now, throwing passengers from side to side. Harvey heard a sharp intake of breath from an air-hostess as she pulled herself along the aisle to the jump seat. He watched as she exchanged a brief and unmistakably fearful glance with her colleague in the aisle opposite. Now the noise of the engines increased as if struggling to keep the plane airborne. Harvey knew something was terribly wrong.’

  It’s not very often that I am left speechless by a short story but ‘The El Segundo Blue Butterfly’ did just that. I will go as far to say that this is the best short story I’ve read this year; and probably the best short story I have ever read. The subject of our story is Christopher and the chapters within this story separate expanses of time in his life; the first of these being about a fourteen-year-old Michael who for his school magazine has to interview Michael Hogan Bernstein. The story benefits from a masterstroke by O’Riordan who uses a devise known as narrative cohesion to get the reader hooked and pulled in for the long-haul whilst also being emotionally invested in the story, the arrestingly brilliant structure decisions of having each chapter being an allotted time period during his life spanning his career and his relationship with Michael Hogan Bernstein which is expanded upon within each chapter culminating in a quite beautiful conclusion, making this a must read for anyone who loves the short story. Actually anyone who loves to read. It’s that good.

  ‘We sit in silence with the pizza between us. I look down at the blistered dough. He takes a bite, chews it slowly, then sips from a plastic cup full of warm Coca-Cola. The red party cup trembling as he brings it to his lips. I tell him I like his jacket. Yeah, it’s real nice, he says. Then like he’s recalling some language he doesn’t quite understand, says, ‘Oleg Cassini’. Je shows me the label, hanging from the frayed lining. His eyes brightened for a moment. ‘He was a friend of mine you know, a close personal friend,’ he says. Then he pauses. ‘Just like you, Christopher, just like you.’

  The story left me in a weird state of nirvana (not the grunge band) but with the feeling of enlightenment, a feeling of joy, seeing a story so full of grace nowadays is a rarity and that’s what’s so amazing about the story and about grace. You can’t help but be emotionally invested in this story and I found myself wanting to share it with other people immediately after finishing it. The story is bloody fantastic and morally anchored to how I believe we all should be; it shows us just how we should be with people we meet in life, people who we serve, who serve us, those who might not deserve anything from us but we offer grace and give it freely as Christopher does; in small but powerful ways. It’s about who we are when no ones watching. It’s a story that I believe makes the heart glad and the reader feeling a sense of wholeness when finished.

  The short story ‘Rambla Pacifico’ was a little gritty and had the feeling of a pulp fiction novel / The Departed cinematic feel to it. The short story itself could have been snap shots taken directly from a full length novel; the characters were well so well rounded I could have quite happily stayed in this world for a lot longer than O’Riordan permits, which is a small bug-bare I had with this particular story. O’Riordan draws us in superbly to a quick paced hostage negotiation (situation) where he expertly keeps things hidden about his characters from the reader so ‘we’ are not quite sure who should be trusted or not and how the whole thing is going to pan out. It’s a uniquely different story compared to the others within this anthology, which I feel helps it stand out. It’s a detailed story with lots of moving parts, which as I mentioned would have been nice to see the plight and conclusions of each character or their characters expanded upon with back-story so we learn more about the shifty characters that make up this story. If O’Riordan were to expand this story either into a novella or a novel I would be first in line to purchase a copy; I felt that O’Riordan invested a lot of time into these complex characters and plot and it all just seemed a little crammed, instead of being afforded the space to grow.

  ‘He turned at the doorway to see Jesus wiping his hands on his apron, then pulling down the tattered sheets of fabric that had been pinned at the windows. The men squinted as light poured into the room. Jesus walked to the door they had entered through and help it open for Lindstrom. Lindstrom heard the lock click closed when he was out in the corridor.

  As he carried Adella down the fire escape, Lindstrom tried not to listen to the noises coming from inside the room. As they neared the street below Lindstrom heard the sound of the police service revolver discharging once, twice, then after a brief pause, for a third time, after which there was silence.’

  ‘Wave-Riding Giants’ is a subtle tale old tale which charts the life of McCauley, who is in a senior housing complex. It reminded me slightly of the Film ‘The Green Mile’ which was originally written by Stephen King. Both have a lovely raconteur vibe about them, Kings version has an old prison guard reflecting on his life on Death Row; O’Riordan’s version has McCauley reminiscing about his life from his vantage point in the housing complex. The opening of the story showcases O’Riordan’s emotive style which is so often expressed within his poetry and it’s delightful to see this being expressed in the short story genre with such aplomb. ‘Wave-Riding Giants’ is another highlight in a brilliant debut collection of short stories from O’Riordan; seeing McCauley’s journey from a young boy to faithful and dutiful husband span only a few pages but told in such a sensitive way the reader can’t help but feel like they have also experienced his highs and lows and feels connected with the protagonist McCauley.

  ‘As McCauley walked up the pathway that led up to the house, he saw Dolores drip to her knees, and then lost sight of her behind the kitchen counter. He saw Moe leaning back, spreading his large hands across the kitchen counter. Then Moe’s cousin running his hand through Dolores’ hair. McCauley saw the cousin’s hand tightly at her jaw, the way you might fit a muzzle on to a greyhound. The next thing McCauley saw was Dolores’ hand gripping at the counter. This came into focus as he walked up the path. McCauley remembered how Moe’s head was tipped now and how his Adam’s apple was bobbing up and down as he swallowed hard. And as quickly as it had happened, Dolores up and laughing and then both men taking her by the wrists and pulling her into the bedroom at the front of the house. McCauley froze outside, halfway along the path and through window screens looked on for what might have been seconds or hours at the blurred shapes the three of them made.’

  ‘Black Bear in the Snow’ focused on the life of Randal and Thelma and their baby after these introductions we are treated to a flashback of Randal going on a hunting trip with his father. It’s here in ‘Black Bear in the Snow’ that O’Riordan expresses his visionary gifting and fully emerses us to what the world was like for Randal. Here is just a small snippet from a story full of these deft touches. ‘When they had reached their destination, they pulled away the trimmed pin stems that covered the mouth of the hide. They had hunkered down in the smell of wet soil and stale piss that Lambrey, who his father served with in the Marines and now ran the lodge, had led his father to the day before. We flash forwards to reveal that Randal and Thelma have separated Joey their son is living with Thelma and her lawyer partner Cody; whom Randal has often overheard his son calling him dad. So wanting to re-connect with his son Randal decides to take him away for a bonding session. This part of the story is well written and the prose deployed by O’Riordan easily whisked me away with the two of them, the awkwardness of it, the desperate acts of trying to connect; Randal had me reminiscing of a time I went out with my father to shoot guns at clay pigeons (never before had we shot guns but for some reason this made us connect at a more primitive way – Me Man. Me Make Fire.), the smell of gun smoke and the cold biting my face and fingers and the ringing in my ears. The conclusion to the story was very emotive and I found myself moved by the way O’Riordan was able to bring it all to its conclusion in such a poignant and thought provoking way. Having his son killing the bear was almost reminiscent of his son laying to rest the memory and hold that his father had over his life. And now it’s returning full circle.

  The short story ‘The Burning Ground’ lives up to the title, it’s a story that follows the life of an artist who has an affair with Alannah (who becomes somewhat of a muse during their yearlong affair). When Alannah goes back to her husband, our aging Artist decides to head out to America, for a fresh break, some inspiration to run away; we don’t know why but when he arrives he finds a resurgence in fame and popularity of his work. But through all this he is constantly reminded of Alannah through his paintbrushes that she bought him during their affair. ‘The Burning Ground’ is a slow burner but again another that fits so wonderfully within this collection by ‘DEBUT’ short story writer Adam O’Riordan.

  ‘They made love at first on the camp bed and then on a patchwork quilt laid on the cold linoleum floor, an old horse blanket by their feet. Gripping at the curves of her hip bones as the gas heater burned on nearby. Looking down at his own body; slackened with age into folds of formless skin, its contours of tightly packed wrinkles and puckering. The sounds of a London afternoon outside, schoolchildren shouting excitedly as they waited for the bus and the sound of the fast train passing on the bridge. Afterwards, he traced the outline of her swimming costume across the soft of her lower back before she rolled away from him and sat up, pulling the blanket over her knees.’

  With ‘’98 Mercury Sable’ It’s here that I thought O’Riordan may have given me something negative to say; as the story starts out describing cars. If anyone knows me, I hate cars; all I know about them is that they have four wheels and you can drive around in them. Colour. Make. Model. Mileage. All of this means nothing to me. But Adam O’Riordan once again has written a story I found impossible to forget, a story that is different from the several before in tone and conclusion. The story focuses on married couple Sebastian and Sofia and their twins; there are some funny excerpts around Sebastian trying to learn how to drive and his numerous failings, but it is the ending of the story which makes the impact, I won’t spoil it for you but the ending hits you right in the face! I don’t use this word often but it was a tour de force O’Riordan handles masterfully. It left me physically shocked. If you can say that about a story, you’ve got yourself a good story!

  ‘A week after my A Levels, I’d failed for speeding. I’d got it into my head that the bearded, bear-like examiner looked like a paedophile, which had really thrown me. It’s amazing what stress can do. The next time was a decade later in Norwich, where Sophia was directing a play. The examiner, a friendly tall man with protruding front teeth and a luminous safety jacket, had just finished a cigarette when we got into the car. You lucky bastard, I thought. I’d given up a week earlier, which, in retrospect, was too much to take on, what with the driving as well.’

  I found the format of ‘Magda’s a Dancer’ really disappointing and I felt a little cheated; having been spoilt with the incredible offerings from O’Riordan prior to this story. The prose of the story is a conversation, which in itself is very witty, interesting, insightful and something that is different from the rest of the anthology; I just felt that it was slightly jarring from the tenderness that O’Riordan had afforded other stories. To have this one appearing more like a script it was a shock to the system, which I wasn’t ready to enjoy. It felt a little out of place and that’s personal taste really as having read the story a couple of times now it’s a great piece of writing; I just thought it didn’t fit within the final collection.

  ‘Sixty-four? Sixty-five?’

  ‘He looked like he knew what he was doing.’

  ‘You think, Zack? He reminded me of that extra from our show, after we transferred.

  What was his name?’

  ‘I know who you mean. Same smile. But hey, at least he’d got her up to his apartment.’

  ‘But they were going down.’

  ‘He’s probably still getting over the divorce. These things take time.’

  ‘Zachary, that’s cruel. Julia! Where did you get that?’

  ‘A bloke in the 7-Eleven.’

  ‘Good work! Need a light?’

  ‘I’ll use the cooker. Zack, finish your story.’

  ‘Where was I?’

  ‘You were about to murder an actress.’

  Thanks, Harry. Shall we open one of these?’

  I’ve found this collection such a delight to read as each story has been so different from the next, skilfully delivered and written in such an original, intelligent and modern way that the reader can’t help but be taken along for the ride.

  So ‘The Burning Ground’ has everything an anthology needs for success; with varying subject matter, fantastic writing, accomplished storytelling whether this is in the longer or shorter stories and a mastery of the language. O’Riordan has made the step up from poetry to short story writer with self-assurance and style, from the beautiful cover to the words held within, ‘The Burning Ground’ will be one of the best anthologies released in 2017, make no doubts about it.

  ‘The Burning Ground’ has everything needed to burn up all the competition. O’Riordan’s fuel for this are his delicately told short stories, the oxygen is his powerfully emotive and intelligently woven subjects of his stories; packing the heat and which completes our fire triangle is how ‘you’ as a reader are changed, warmed and feel completed by reading them. It’s a tremendous accomplishment stepping out into a new genre and blowing up the competition, something truly brilliant exists within ‘The Burning Ground’.

  *

  Adam O’Riordan was born in Manchester in 1982 and read English at Oxford University. In 2008 O’Riordan became the youngest Poet-in-Residence at The Wordsworth Trust, the Centre for British Romanticism. His first collection ‘In the Flesh’ (Chatto and Windus) won a Somerset Maugham Award in 2011. He is Lecturer in Poetry Writing at the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University.

  The Burning Ground was published by Bloomsbury Books on 12th January 2017.

  You can purchase a copy of The Burning Ground from Foyles:

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  To discover more about Bloomsbury Books click here…

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  *

  Review by Ross Jeffery

• Los Angeles Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/whatever-was-left-of-that-other-life-on-adam-oriordans-a-herring-famine-and-the-burning-ground-stories/#!
  Word count: 1574

  QUOTE:
  A Herring Famine, is a sleeper agent of sorts. The poems are refined, polished up like a cricket ball — and, like a cricket ball, much harder, denser, and more damaging than they initially appear. Their surface elegance suggests restraint, calm, and ease, but these are mostly poems of alarm, of panic and disappearance. Their craft and guile risk obscuring the talent that birthed them.
  O’Riordan does indeed make hard work look easy; one potential consequence is the possibility of his being dismissed as a mere stylist, or fancy boy, when in fact he is fascinatingly terrified. What he exhibits here is less dandyish flair than the ability to cope under pressure.

  “Whatever Was Left of That Other Life”: On Adam O’Riordan’s “A Herring Famine” and “The Burning Ground: Stories”
  By Declan Ryan

  8 0 1

  APRIL 16, 2017

  ADAM O’RIORDAN’S SECOND COLLECTION of poems, A Herring Famine, is a sleeper agent of sorts. The poems are refined, polished up like a cricket ball — and, like a cricket ball, much harder, denser, and more damaging than they initially appear. Their surface elegance suggests restraint, calm, and ease, but these are mostly poems of alarm, of panic and disappearance. Their craft and guile risk obscuring the talent that birthed them. Hugo Williams, channeling Fred Astaire, has long held to the dictum that “if it doesn’t look easy, you aren’t working hard enough,” and O’Riordan does indeed make hard work look easy; one potential consequence is the possibility of his being dismissed as a mere stylist, or fancy boy, when in fact he is fascinatingly terrified. What he exhibits here is less dandyish flair than the ability to cope under pressure.

  In “Christ of Taüll,” the speaker “stare[s] into the face” of the eponymous Savior, recalling a scene of murder on a church’s steps and performing a quietly remarkable sleight of hand. The violence of the summoned, or reported, memory — “the lead slug / fingered at but irretrievable, tiny / bubbles bursting at the corner of his mouth” — is not the real disaster here. The actual damage is psychic, silent, prolonged — “Ego sum lux mundi, by the Christ of Taüll / I saw the face at first, then no face at all.” Apparently a play on the idea of looking through an image, of simple disappearance, there is more at stake here than the optical, surface effect. If man is made in the likeness of God, to look through the picture into nothing, for there to be “no face at all,” isn’t merely a sense of identity slippage, but of the loss of salvation: the Christological light of the world — “lux mundi” — is not so much occluded as snuffed out entirely. O’Riordan’s smuggling in of this damnation, or at least turning from favor, is so subtly done it practically begs to be missed; to express it directly would be too portentous. And yet, we are unmistakeably operating in a world from which grace has been removed, as in a Flannery O’Connor story.

  “Christ of Taüll” comes from a sequence titled “Catalunya,” and its companion poems also feature disappearances: “Whatever was left of that other life / I laid it out on the Carrer Sant Pau”; “as if my hands might pass right through her”; “smoke rolling in like fog, / erasing every one of us.” These are poems written after fracture, trying to remake themselves and the world around them — sometimes hot with the terror of desire, and at others mourning loss and the curses it bestows. In “Sulphur,” one of the highpoints of the collection, lust and fear are intermingled, and the passion of “man and wife, / eyeing each other like traitors” is no different from the vulnerable, antic impulses of the “screaming chicks scratching in the rafters” or the cocaine-injected stallions “frothing, teeth-bared, wild-eyed in the darkness.” It finds a companion of sorts on its facing page, “The Caracalla Baths,” which also highlights the death drive and recklessness involved in love. The poem’s addressee “recognise[d] the need / to crawl on hands and knees, initiate, deep into” the blood of a drugged bull; this isn’t a horror scene, however, but part of the construction of a cult of loss, a place where “each bitter kiss, each fumbled, flickering lust / lives.”

  Desire and departure combine most dramatically and emotionally in the sequence “Six Scenes from a Marriage,” which aren’t so much remembrances as reconstructions, “vanishing acts” staged and pored over but never quite resurrected. The speaker “want[s] to write my way back into this love,” and, in these snapshots, exploits the lyric poem’s ability to speak to someone who can’t answer back. He wishes to perform a sacrament rather than confess to a diary: “to come to her as softly as wind or rain moving through the barley,” to “trace you back to the room / before we left.” This is poetry as time travel and haunting — the lost lover alive but absent, no less irrecoverable than Hardy’s Emma, “leaning against a bicycle on a treeless hill at dusk.”

  O’Riordan writes of other sorts of losses, too. The sequence that gives the collection its title bemoans the damage wrought by the loss of skill and trade, which came when the poet’s forebears abandoned their fishing nets for factories, taking on “the shame / that no wealth / would ever erase.” The closing poem, “The Boundary Line,” is another standout — an elegy for a school friend that opens out onto a Larkinesque “silence that is unending / through that dense nothing that awaits us all.” At their best, the poems draw the reader into just such silences; one is made to feel the lure of the void at, say, Berlin’s Berghain nightclub, with its “rituals of disappearance.” There are lulls in the book, poems that don’t quite stretch themselves beyond a gesture at an interesting thing, and a flat, journalistic sequence about the 1990 Strangeways Prison riot, which keep O’Riordan’s knack for the telling insight at arm’s length. That said, this is more than an admirable return, and evidence of a hard-won development in O’Riordan’s sinuous voice. The added grit pleasingly scuffs some of the more polite and less interesting luster of In the Flesh, his 2010 debut.

  As well as a new book of poems, O’Riordan has produced The Burning Ground, a collection of short stories all set in, or at least spinning out of, Los Angeles. They’re no less interested in the idea of vanishing, with more than a few of the characters being diminished or acting out their own “rituals of disappearance.” One senses O’Riordan having fun with the form, the slight cheer of the trespasser; the poetry feels innate, while this feels more often like writing. Luckily, he’s a fine writer, even if “Rambla Pacifico,” a rheumy fixer’s quest to rescue his boss’s daughter from a kidnapping, with the aid of a no-nonsense toughnut called Jesus, for all its obvious merits, comes off as an attempt at a sequel to Drive. One also gets the nagging sense, at times, that his influences are crowding in a little too closely. There’s plenty of Salter and Yates to the moments of despair or lust, but enough O’Riordan for this never to feel like fancy-dress. The choice to set the stories in Los Angeles is winningly knowing, and the thrill of escape is as much the English poet O’Riordan’s as is it is that of his characters. “Black Bear in the Snow” is one of the most interesting stories here, not least for its more pronounced sense of cracking up, or failing to perform. It features a line that seems to get at the heart of both O’Riordan’s recent books, comparing a light aircraft’s wings to “the arms of a man on a high wire trying very hard not to fall.” When O’Riordan is less interested in keeping up appearances, the stories feel fresher and more daring. His poetic talent for simile and image is certainly transferred intact to prose. Perhaps the biggest revelation is that he’s also an admirable humorist: the less poised narrator of “’98 Mercury Sable” — “not a natural driver,” is transplanted from Southport, which is “so mind-numbingly dull in the evening all you really want to do is stay in and learn your highway code,” to a seemingly throwaway piece about male incompetence and the charm of the open road, at least until its twist ending. It provides one of the book’s most memorable voices, a welcome change of pace and tone.

  The world being as it is, O’Riordan’s prose will likely reach a far wider audience than the poems, but one hopes it will draw readers to seek out the latter. To readers of his poetry, the stories feel a bit like getting to know someone’s holiday self rather than the bundle of incoherence that sits down to breakfast back home. The Burning Ground reads best in the round.

  ¤

  Declan Ryan’s debut pamphlet was published in the Faber New Poets series in 2014. He teaches at King’s College, London, where he edits wildcourt.co.uk.

• Financial Times
  https://www.ft.com/content/c5fe0ebe-e2e9-11e6-9645-c9357a75844a
  Word count: 664

  QUOTE:
  As a whole, this assured and elegant collection is interested not in answers but in questions, in ambivalence: passing moments, frozen in time as if by a photographer’s keen eye, a lens catching light.

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  https://www.ft.com/content/c5fe0ebe-e2e9-11e6-9645-c9357a75844a

  The Burning Ground by Adam O’Riordan — drifting through
  Ballardian characters populate an assured collection of short stories

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  Philip Womack

  JANUARY 27, 2017 0
  The protagonists of The Burning Ground, Adam O’Riordan’s debut collection of short stories, are men of a stoical bent, usually known by their surnames, as in the novels of JG Ballard. In tales set on the US west coast they are moved around by circumstance, buffeted by change; like Ballardian men, they live cheek-by-jowl with freeways and marketing campaigns on the one hand, violence and sex on the other.

  More often than not their relationships are broken; some of them are artists, while others have been in the military and now drift, unsure of their position in the world. They meet on planes, trains; they drive; are shifted about, and must shift for themselves, aware of their insignificance and yet of the portentousness of things too. They seek stability, or even a word, or gesture from someone they loved, or who might have loved them.

  O’Riordan is keenly aware of the passing of time, as exemplified in “The El Segundo Blue Butterfly”, in which an ambitious young boy interviews a dodgy businessman for his school paper. The boy becomes a reporter; the businessman is exposed in his dealings; yet the connection between the two provides the only constant in lives riven by vicissitudes. Similarly, in “Black Bear in the Snow”, a father estranged from his son attempts to recreate a hunting trip he made with his own father, and finds that while time does not necessarily fix things, nor does it break them fully.

  Time is strongly linked (not just etymologically, but symbolically) to weather, and there are many lambent images. In “A Thunderstorm in Santa Monica”, a man stands at the end of a pier “at what seemed like the very tip of this city”. In a liminal space, facing the elements, he reassesses his connections and disconnections, briefly lit by lightning. Plane crashes also are a strong motif, metaphors for these broken lives.

  The tone is not always ominous: “’98 Mercury Sable” appears at first to be about another drifter, here an Englishman whose wife is a successful film-maker. The true story, though, is something glimpsed in a parking lot. O’Riordan is good at suggesting the flow and rush of life continuing around us as we career blindly onwards — a technique in sparsity applied from his poetry — and he gives us many flashes of lyricism: “The forest seemed to fold the light in on itself.”

  The pieces are not technically inventive, except the final one, “Magda’s a Dancer”, told only in dialogue, which conveys both farce and a sense of impending disaster.

  As a whole, this assured and elegant collection is interested not in answers but in questions, in ambivalence: passing moments, frozen in time as if by a photographer’s keen eye, a lens catching light.

  The Burning Ground by Adam O’Riordan, Bloomsbury £16.99, 208 pages

• Book Forum
  http://www.bookforum.com/review/18012
  Word count: 1134

  JUN 2 2017
  The Burning Ground by Adam O'Riordan
  Morten Høi Jensen
  web exclusive

  Who can begrudge us foreigners our attraction to Los Angeles—its sprawling circuitry of wealth and poverty, beauty and damnation, innocence and experience? With its palm-screened boulevards, model-thronged beaches, and movie-star aura, LA seems faintly make-believe, yet we know that it is also a place of real crime, cults, and carbon emissions. In The Burning Ground, Adam O’Riordan’s debut collection of stories, the city is primarily a place of loneliness, ennui, and drift. An aging British painter escapes to California following the disintegration of a love affair; a divorced father drags his teenage son on an ill-advised hunting trip; a widower in a nursing facility on the Venice boardwalk recalls the day he discovered his wife cheating on him. As the book’s epigraph, culled from an essay by Christopher Isherwood tells us, California invariably presents the visitor with a kind of Faustian bargain: “You are perfectly welcome . . . during your short visit. Everything is at your disposal. Only, I must warn you, if things go wrong, don’t blame me. I accept no responsibility. I am not part of your neurosis. Don’t cry to me for safety. There is no home here.”

  Born in Manchester, Adam O’Riordan is known as one of England’s most promising young poets, winning the Somerset Maugham Award in 2011 for his first collection, In the Flesh. (A second book, A Herring Famine, was published earlier this year.) But you wouldn’t guess that from The Burning Ground, which never once reads like the work of a newcomer to fiction. Any temptation toward poeticism has been quelled. Applied to prose, O’Riordan’s noticing eye is sharply attuned to the grit and grime of Los Angeles and its inhabitants. We see the chin and mouth of a teenage boy “blistering with acne,” and the “caramels of [the] cashew-shaped teeth” of a meth addict. In “Wave-Riding Giants,” we see a disabled child whose “floppy and white” legs remind the main character of “two wilted sticks of spargel.”

  The Burning Ground toys with an impressive range of voices and forms. “Magda’s a Dancer,” for instance, is a story composed entirely in unattributed dialogue, while “Rambla Pacifico,” in which the foreman of a building project enlists a tight-lipped World War II veteran in the search for his employer’s daughter, reads like a hardboiled Raymond Chandler pastiche. It’s a world where stoic men take “long pulls” from their drinks and think of the past: “Lindberg sipped the cocktail from the chilled glass where three oversize olives skewered by a plastic shard left an oily sheen on the surface. It tasted good, it tasted of those summers with Angelica before the girls were born.”

  In these instances, O’Riordan relies too heavily on cinematic convention. Far better are those stories in which he brings his outsider’s perspective to bear on the gaudy otherness of the city, the sense of dislocation it can evoke. His characters (and they are all, alas, men) find a reflection of their own rootlessness and estrangement in the unreal city. The aging painter in “The Burning Ground,” who intends to stay in California for only a winter, ends up never returning to London. “Life in the impossible village,” he decides, “had proved tolerable”: “The light, the absence of clear seasons, the cloud that sat low along the coast in May and June, and occasional days of rain only endeared the city to him. Each gave his life a welcome sense of stasis.”

  In the book’s finest story, “A Thunderstorm in Santa Monica,” we follow Harvey, a freelance copywriter from London, on a visit to Los Angeles to see his long-distance lover, a film financier. It is Harvey’s third trip to California in eighteen months; what began as an exciting indulgence has become an expensive habit. But it isn’t Teresa, his lover, that Harvey is addicted to; nor the fancy industry dinners and cocktail parties he is obliged to attend. No, what Harvey is addicted to, he realizes, is “the eleven-hour lacuna of the flight” from London to Los Angeles:

  After the thrill of take-off came the endurance test of the hours mid-air. He would start and then abandon films, leaving their protagonists frozen on the small screen. Harvey relished this restlessness, the boredom of a quality last known in childhood. Then would come a few hours of fitful sleep. Slack-mouthed, snapping awake as his neck gave under the weight of his head.

  Harvey is typical of the men we come across in The Burning Ground. He is divorced and lives alone in a small apartment. Teresa, more than five-thousand miles away, remains his only real source of human affection. Yet on a recent flight to Los Angeles he befriends a fellow passenger, Nick, who, during a passage of sudden and severe turbulence, grips Harvey’s hand: “Neither man looked at the other but it was understood by Harvey that he had been reached out to in his last moments. That humanity had prevailed and that men had faced their fate together.” Later, while staggering drunkenly through a rain shower on the Santa Monica pier, Harvey calls Nick and asks if he’d like to get together for a drink sometime. Nick, roused semiconsciously from his sleep by the call, merely hangs up the phone. Harvey remains standing on the pier—“at what seemed like the very tip of this city”—waiting for the storm to approach.

  O’Riordan’s vision of Los Angeles as place where people come to simply wait out the rest of their lives is a stark contrast to everything the city, on its glittering surface, appears to promise. Most of the characters here are in transit, either physically or metaphorically, and perhaps one of the reasons O’Riordan writes so well, and so often, about air travel is because being in transit can seem representative of the full span of a human life. After the thrill of take-off comes the long endurance test of life, with its inevitable boredom and its all too certain destination. “There is no home here,” as Isherwood’s epigraph has it. Indeed, O’Riordan seems to suggest there is no home anywhere; no permanence or stability, no ground beneath our feet. Dislocation and estrangement, in this auspicious prose debut, is something like the natural condition of life, which keeps travelling onward even if we don’t.

  Morten Høi Jensen is the author of A Difficult Death: The Life and Work of Jens Peter Jacobsen, which will be published by Yale University Press in September.

• The Star
  https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/reviews/2017/08/04/poet-adam-oriordans-literary-gifts-struggle-in-debut-fiction.html
  Word count: 542

  Poet Adam O’Riordan’s literary gifts struggle in debut fiction
  The Burning Ground, O’Riordan’s short stories, show compelling language, but few emotional fireworks.

  The Burning Ground, by Adam O'Riordan, WW Norton, 224 pages, $34.95.
  The Burning Ground, by Adam O'Riordan, WW Norton, 224 pages, $34.95. (WW NORTON)
  Adam O'Riordan, author of The Burning Ground, WW Norton.
  Adam O'Riordan, author of The Burning Ground, WW Norton. (GEORGE CHEVALIER LEWIS)
  The Burning Ground, by Adam O'Riordan, WW Norton, 224 pages, $34.95.
  The Burning Ground, by Adam O'Riordan, WW Norton, 224 pages, $34.95. (WW NORTON)
  Adam O'Riordan, author of The Burning Ground, WW Norton.
  Adam O'Riordan, author of The Burning Ground, WW Norton. (GEORGE CHEVALIER LEWIS)

  By TREVOR CORKUMSpecial to the Star
  Fri., Aug. 4, 2017
  British poet Adam O’Riordan’s debut collection of fiction, The Burning Ground, is rich with moody atmosphere, but ultimately short on delivering the sustained emotional fireworks promised by his obvious talents. While his ear for crisp, compelling language is apparent, many of the stories feel a little too movie-ready, as if the camera’s hovering in the wings, anxious to swoop in for a close-up. It’s perhaps no coincidence that all eight stories — wildly different in tone and premise — are set in and around the glitzy wastelands of Los Angeles.

  Take “Rambla Pacifico”, a sprawling tale about a foreman who ventures into the California underworld to solve the disappearance of his employer’s daughter. Occupying that no man’s land between longish short story and slight novella, it’s set up like a noirish, Pulp Fiction thriller. The electric premise quickly morphs into uneven boilerplate territory, as if O’Riordan has lent his poet’s eye to a second-rate studio film script. Meanwhile in the collection’s title story, an elderly painter pines for his younger mistress a full five years after the dissolution of their strangely passionless affair. O’Riordan is mostly impeccable with pacing and rhythm, spinning out slow-motion suspense with ease, but in this story the effect is heavy-handed, culminating in the over-wrought, climactic burning of a set of expensive paint brushes.

  Elsewhere, O’Riordan’s descriptions of women are often unconvincing, and at their worst, steeped in cliché, such as the “low, pendulous breasts” ascribed to the narrator’s grandmother in the otherwise promising “Wave-Riding Giants,” about a lonely widower reflecting on the ebbing tide of his life.

  A few of the pieces might have been cut altogether, such as the collection’s awkward closer, “Magda’s a Dancer.” Told entirely in dialogue, a riff on two British couples drinking in a rental apartment in downtown LA, the story lacks heart or real tension, reading instead like an MFA workshop exercise or a hastily cribbed journal entry.

  Still, there are near beauties. “A Thunderstorm in Santa Monica” — following a young man who flies to America to visit his distracted lover — captures the contemporary angst and artifice of global long-distance romance.

  On the whole, however, O’Riordan’s literary gifts, while on clear display, struggle to deliver a fully satisfying read.

  Trevor Corkum’s novel The Electric Boy is forthcoming from Doubleday Canada.

• The Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/sep/04/in-flesh-adam-oriordan-poetry
  Word count: 1015

  QUOTE:
  bewitchingly recherché debut
  there's a poise and precision to his writing, a gift for imagery and a willingness to venture far from home and explore multiple (frequently unsympathetic) voices that give his poems a preternatural maturity. Expect a great deal more from Adam O'Riordan in years to come.

  In the Flesh by Adam O'Riordan
  Sarah Crown is beguiled by an elegant debut preoccupied with loss and the passage of time
  Sarah Crown

  Fri 3 Sep 2010 19.06 EDT First published on Fri 3 Sep 2010 19.06 EDT
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  Adam O'Riordan opens In the Flesh with a page-long poem called, simply, "Manchester". As well he might: this is his first collection, and Manchester is the city of his birth. But rather than describing the city in 2010, or even in 1982, when he made his entrance into it, he fishes back through time to the moment of Manchester's pomp, when it stood as the world's first bona fide industrial boom town. "Queen of the cotton cities", he addresses it magniloquently in the opening line, "nightly I piece you back into existence" – and goes on to do just that, through succulent descriptions of the "frayed bridal train" of factory chimneys; the "warped applause-track of Victorian rain" that wets the miry streets.

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  This fascination with what's gone provides the impetus that drives O'Riordan's bewitchingly recherché debut. Again and again, in an attempt to stage a recovery of the lives that are in danger of disappearing beneath the swirl of the past, his poems fix on objects imbued with personal history and bring their stories back to the surface.

  In the neat sonnet sequence "Vanishing Points", O'Riordan chooses three articles from three different years – the beach huts from a 1930 family holiday, a 1906 letter from a father to his daughter on her wedding day, a Dunfermline trade union college in 1983 – and wrings out their resonance. In the first sonnet, the shadow of the future presses on the family – "basking in the salt-air and sun between two wars" – and the mood is one of chagrin at the passage of time, the blink-and-you'll-miss-it nature of happiness. In the second, however, a formal feeling is achieved: the letter becomes a flare that illuminates the past's darkness. The father's identity "clings" to it "like a broken web to a windowsill", its words revealing fragments of a man who "at wakes would carry . . . hospitality to extravagance" and "never spoke English with any satisfaction". "I roll your word for liquor, usquebaugh, around my mouth", the speaker says reverently, before letting the whiskey drip down into a lustrous final couplet in which the last line is spun out beyond its natural length to extend the warmth of the moment: "You are distilled before you disappear forever / like the raised glass, the sunlight on one last golden measure."

  Seeking for things that are lost is a preoccupation. Even in the poems set in the present day there's a pervasive sense of absence – though here what's missing tends to be love. "Goooogle" offers a prayer for "the men who sit, / pale as geishas", feeding their computers with "maiden names / and zip codes / of ex-lovers"; "The Moth" ends with the speaker sitting in the dark "on a bed too small to contain your absence"; in the nifty "NGC3949" (the number-tag of "a galaxy in Ursa Major whose formation mirrors, almost exactly, that of our own"), a glimpse of "the cut and sway of a dark form" conjures mistakenly, achingly, a former flame.

  A pair of sonnets entitled "The Edges of Love" see O'Riordan coming at the idea of lack from a different angle – examining conditional absences, the things that might have been. Both are written in an implicating second-person. In the first, a conference-goer looks out of his window and falls for "a figure crossing a field" while "back home in a bright room / your children are being kissed and tucked into their sheets"; in the second, a new father locks eyes with a stranger "and a lifetime unfolds" in the moment before "she disappears again". All these absences give the title a retrospective wash of irony: very few of the subjects are here in the flesh, after all. But flesh itself sprawls across these pages, adding a sticky sheen to compositions that are otherwise elegantly formal.

  It's there, gloriously, in a handful of feverish poems on sex. In one, "Cheat", "with him away" (absence again) the speaker "sunk with the fluke of your hips, / our movements incessant as a distaff and spindle". In another two food and sex intermingle, most memorably in the mixing of a bloody mary.

  Elsewhere, though, desire tips quickly into disgust. In the superb "The Leverets", the arrival of a baby is balanced by a cat's gift of "a frail bag of fur" spilling "a fine rope of gut" on the doorstep, while in the graceful-grisly "The Corpse Garden" a man keeps watch over a "patch of campus" in which unidentified bodies are left to rot in order to determine a cause of death. "I stay with the dead," the speaker says, "through their putrefaction / mapping the body's catastrophic geography. / Nursemaids to insects, their skin laced with eggs / like strings of pearls".

  For all its verve, this is not a flawless debut. Odd phrases jar and sag. The central sequence, "Home" – written during O'Riordan's term as poet-in-residence at Wordsworth's Dove Cottage in the Lake District – is somewhat patchy, with the poet returning again to a sonnet form that begins to jangle through overuse. Here the pieces feel less natural, more contrived than the rest of the collection. But there's a poise and precision to his writing, a gift for imagery and a willingness to venture far from home and explore multiple (frequently unsympathetic) voices that give his poems a preternatural maturity. Expect a great deal more from Adam O'Riordan in years to come.

• The Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jul/04/in-the-flesh-adam-oriordan
  Word count: 705

  QUOTE:
  This collection does not read like a debut. It has an established feel – as if Adam O'Riordan, who is in his mid-20s, had been around for decades. Only that makes him sound dusty, and he isn't. The unfashionable beauty of this collection – shining, musical, aloof – is that it is intimate without being confessional.

  In the Flesh by Adam O'Riordan
  In this assured debut, a host of subjects – from private moments to everyday objects – are invested with sensuous beauty
  Kate Kellaway

  Sat 3 Jul 2010 19.02 EDT First published on Sat 3 Jul 2010 19.02 EDT
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  This collection does not read like a debut. It has an established feel – as if Adam O'Riordan, who is in his mid-20s, had been around for decades. Only that makes him sound dusty, and he isn't. The unfashionable beauty of this collection – shining, musical, aloof – is that it is intimate without being confessional.

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  After leaving Oxford, O'Riordan was, for a year, poet-in-residence at the Wordsworth Trust and his debt to the Romantics is clear. But his own subjects extend confidently beyond the pastoral: there is an awful (in the best sense) sequence of poems, "The Act of Falling", about Emily Davison, the suffragette killed by the King's horse at the Derby, an opening poem saluting Manchester and another entitled "A Trade Union College, Dunfermline, 1983". But he also writes with precise wit about the natural world: a moth is "a natural under the spotlight"; a crab apple is "of performing arts the slowest". And the sea is inescapable as a love affair: "the salt's relentless intimacy". This collection is a most finished beginning.

  "Goooogle" (its extra oo's like two popping eyes) sets the tone: sympathetic, witty and sage in its attitude towards the romantic boffin and his diminished life, pursuing ex-lovers online. It is beautifully done, and there is sober comedy in the uselessly summoned information: "Homecoming Queen, Quaker settler, tenured academic".

  But O'Riordan's imagination is a search engine of a different kind and he is determined not to let poetic opportunity slip. He is fired by souvenirs and bygones – a photo taken with a Box Brownie camera ("Vanishing Points: Beach Huts, Milford 1930"), a seaside postcard ("Cheat"), double basins where the Wordsworths – William and Dorothy – once washed their hands ("A Double Wash Stand"). One marvels at how much time – past, present and future – a single poem can hold. In "Vanishing Points" we skim from a photo of a mother and her boys into their future: one dies in a burning tank; the other, at his mother's deathbed, will "wildly shake/a bell for nurse, then drive in silence to collect the priest".

  O'Riordan excels at squeezebox poetry – time concertinas. His imagination exists on the brink of extinction ("sudden and bright and in a moment over"). Poetry is salvage: "Think of our life together becoming utterly lost,/and lift this camera like a bible for an oath."

  These are incantatory poems that insist on being read aloud. Sounds extend emotions and take the poems further than one thought they could go. It is this that makes much of his writing erotic – that and his eye for detail. In two sexy companion pieces, "On Fixing a Bloody Mary" and "Oysters", the poems appear on facing pages, as if at a table for two. Oysters are hammered open until: "…light moves in the darkened chamber./ Naked on its bed of bone, you offer it: vulviform, raw, exposed." The Bloody Mary tastes of "fermented honey". In another poem, "Dressing", a lover applies make-up and paints herself out of the narrator's radar and the room with "blinds half-lowered like eyelids before a kiss". And in the stunning "A Department Store Escalator, Paris", a woman is sighted on an escalator and an imagined biography takes hold, the shared life they will never lead. "In the café your wife asks why you're so distracted. Nothing, you tell her, it's nothing." It is life's answer to Google, the vivid sighting of a stranger – a passing moment – in the flesh.

• Varsity
  https://www.varsity.co.uk/reviews/4286
  Word count: 406

  Books: Adam O’Riordan poetry reading
  Charlotte Keith is seriously impressed by the Shirley Society’s latest offering
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  In the Flesh
  ADAMORIORDAN.COM
  As the youngest person ever to be offered the position of Poet-in-Residence at the Wordsworth Trust, Adam O’Riordan has a lot to be pleased about. There’s also his first collection, In the Flesh (from which he read), which won in 2011 won a Somerset Maugham Award, given to the Society of Authors’ choice for the best book published that year by a writer under 35. He is, in other words, hot (literary) property. O’Riordan represents something that many student writers long to one day be – successful, critically acclaimed, regularly featured in The Guardian, and friends with Carol Ann Duffy.

  This reading was a reminder of the force of the spoken word. Hearing a writer read their work, the poetry is personalized in the least glib sense; as well as personal prefaces to work that can often seem oblique. And a line like ‘a palpitation shot from heart to scrotum’ was always going to work better spoken aloud than on the page.

  Shirley Society Poster
  ANTONIA STRINGER
  There’s also the fact that O’Riordan’s work lives up to the hype. He opened with the first poem in the collection, which addresses Manchester, ‘Queen of the cotton cities/Nightly I piece you back into existence’ – very much at ease, O’Riordan clearly enjoys reading his work. The assembled students were won over from the first. ‘Gooogle’, a poem described by O’Riordan as ‘the best thing in this book’ begins:

  “A prayer then

  for the men who sit

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  pale as geishas,

  by the glow of obsolete

  computers”

  O’Riordan described his subject matter here as the ‘new and subtle forms of melancholy afforded by the information age’: finally, a poet who knows what it is to Facebook stalk one’s exes.

  The Shirley Society continue their brilliant line-up for this term with Lavinia Greenlaw, winner of the 1997 Forward Poetry Prize – whose collection The Casual Perfect was one of my top ten of 2011 –on the 29th February.

• The Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/18/a-herring-famine-adam-o-riordan-review
  Word count: 1102

  QUOTE:
  O’Riordan has a genuine gift, and for any talented writer it can be easy to slip into writing that asks and risks little. Where A Herring Famine excels is in poems that, alongside their craft and guile, wear their heart on their sleeve.
  Poetry
  A Herring Famine by Adam O’Riordan review – poems of craft and guile
  A promising poet’s second collection delivers work full of subtle music that wears its heart on its sleeve

  Ben Wilkinson

  Sat 18 Feb 2017 07.00 EST Last modified on Wed 29 Nov 2017 04.53 EST
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  A Heaney-like attention to the texture and weight of language … Adam O’Riordan
  Paradox is one of the cornerstones of poetry. Emotion jostles with meticulous craftiness, approaching complexity and formal pattern with a deceptive ease and rebelliousness. A poem might comfort, flatter or deceive just as readily as it offers an unflinching truth. It depends on tension as an arrow does its quivering bowstring, going nowhere fast without it. Adam O’Riordan’s first collection, In the Flesh (2010), demonstrated many of these qualities. Its best poems were those with a metaphysical cast of mind: “NGC3949”, named after a galaxy in Ursa Major that mirrors our own, connects with another case of cosmic mistaken identity, spotting “a lover’s shape” in a crowded bar. In poems of poised lyricism, the book revealed an obsession with the line between beauty and violence, but also a fear of erasure, finding consolation in poetry’s potential to commemorate and commit to memory.

  From the beginning, A Herring Famine promises more of the same. Its opening poem, “Crossing the Meadow”, blurs two separate memories of a field: one at night, where “sleeping ponies” are “still as standing stones”; another where speaker and confidante find “a goose receding into boggy underfoot, / bloody gristle and yellowed bone”. The language and imagery are both beautiful and stark, musically exact – the kind of deft lyric style we have come to expect from this poet. It is evident throughout, in poems equally balanced between life’s insistence and mortality’s looming presence. Where “The Caracalla Baths” tells of Roman public spaces since used for operas, figuratively “drenched” with the “hot, unstopping blood” of 20th-century fascism, “Sulphur” intersects the gestured-to damage of a relationship with the grim history of Sicilian sulphur mines, ending on an image of stallions “injected with cocaine” for racing, “frothing, teeth bared, wild-eyed in the darkness”.

  However, despite its obvious merits, you can’t help but feel there’s something a little too studied about the writing. Those “wild-eyed” horses, for example, feel like an attempt to give the poem an impetus it lacks. “In those / months the commonplace became miraculous” we are told rather than shown, a phrase that calls to mind Seamus Heaney, inviting a natural comparison. Like Heaney’s, O’Riordan’s best poems reveal an unusually precise attention to the texture, weight and subtle music of language. “Glance from the barrel where the bones are bled”, begins “Ghost Ranch”. Read those lines of O’Riordan’s aloud and they force your whole mouth into movement, a trick that the Irish master all but perfected, bringing language to life.

  The language and imagery are both beautiful and stark, musically exact
  But even great poets have off days, and a characteristic of Heaney’s work – unspoken and almost a blasphemy in certain circles, given his gradual elevation to sainthood – is one that Philip Larkin noted early on, despite gifting the young poet a prestigious award: sometimes it is just too literary and boring. Not dissimilarly, O’Riordan’s lines exhibit a fine degree of polish and charm – few younger British poets can wrench language into such elegant shapes – but the poems can still remain oddly flat, forgettable, lacking that rebelliousness and urgency we look for in language used for its own imaginative purposes.

  I say all of this since O’Riordan has a genuine gift, and for any talented writer it can be easy to slip into writing that asks and risks little. Where A Herring Famine excels is in poems that, alongside their craft and guile, wear their heart on their sleeve. “Six Scenes from a Marriage” is the book’s triumph. O’Riordan’s delicate, attentive music is especially suited to capturing the intimacies and harm of our loves; allied to an almost-scientific interest in time’s tricks and distortions, he is able to capture the way we can sometimes feel locked out of our lives, the past constantly eluding us. Recalling his ex-wife “alone on the summer island of her childhood”, the speaker confesses that “I want to write my way back into this love. / To meet her newly resident in silence, in long hours of light”. “I am writing to your absence,” he later recognises, “to the distances which open up between us”; “I am remembering that walk in the rain and early dark”. Moving and honest, graceful but also raw, the sequence is a haunting portrait of loss. It is in many ways O’Riordan’s abiding subject, as another standout poem, “The Leap”, proves. Here a tender, unforgettable truth emerges from an anecdote about a child’s fear: “And when you surfaced, her tears stopped / and we who watched knew all there was of loss, / of stepping off, of how a life // is lived in the reflection of our falling / in the eyes of those we love.”

  Elsewhere, O’Riordan pushes his writing into wider historical territory, attempting a blow-by-blow account of the Strangeways prison riot of 1990, “soft flesh breaking against bone, / skulls split like antique oak, / the eggshell of a shattered eye socket”. But where this often feels notes-like, a scattered sequence that hasn’t quite found its form, the tale that gives the book its title is much more effective. Blending anecdotal memories of the poet’s mother’s family – fishermen from Aberdeen who came to work in Manchester’s factories – and social history, “A Herring Famine” imagines his ancestors’ skilled trade “slowly bleeding / from their fingers, // how to thread / a net or weave / a creel”. “What lasts?” asks the speaker. It is a question O’Riordan’s poems will no doubt continue to answer in imaginative, emotive ways.

  • A Herring Famine is published by Chatto & Windus. To order a copy for £8.50 (RRP £10) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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