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Floods is the second collection by Maurice Riordan, an Irishman living on London whose first book, A Word from the Loki, was nominated for the T S Eliot Prize. It opens with The Sloe, a poem over four pages which constitutes one long - one very long - sentence. If the form is reminiscent of that great master of the one-sentence-poem, Michael Longley, the poem’s subject seems to owe something to another eminent fellow Irish poet, Seamus Heaney. The Sloe centres itself around the frozen and preserved corpse of a man, apparently from the Iron Age. In North, Seamus Heaney famously wrote of the Bog People, those preserved corpses of Iron Age peat bogs such as The Tollund Man and his death as a ritual sacrifice to the Earth Goddess:

She tightened her torc on him
And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint’s kept body...

Riordan’s victim on the other hand dies trapped in a snowfall, after suffering an injury from an “assault - from a wild beast I or fellow man”. From this rather more random death, Riordan’s speaker concentrates purely on the rational and observable facts:

…although I can tell you
nothing of his gods or language,
almost nothing of his way of life,
whether he was shepherd, headman,
or shaman, the last of his village,
or employed on some delicate embassy...
I can tell exactly
how he died...

This, in further unspooling clauses, the poem proceeds to do. Where Heaney lards on the mythic resonance of his subject, The Sloe finds its sense of mystery or wonder in the sheer presence of the preserved body and the implications held in the passage of time. Moreover, the poem still comes down to a question of belief and a natural miracle, “the sloe, the uneaten sloe” of which “they say ‘A frost will sweeten it”’:

…so it is grave goods, viaticum,
food for the soul on its journey...
…and when the temperature drops
and the body’s anaesthetised,
as the brain sinks into its reverie
of log fires and song,
of dripping fat and tree sap,
even as the skin adheres to the earth,
the tannins and acids disintegrate
so that now, as I put the sloe back in the ice,
I tell you it is edible,
that, by morning, it was sweet.

Again, where the “I” of poems such as The Tollund Man is clearly representative of Heaney, feeling “lost, / Unhappy and at home”, Riordan’s speaker (who speaks to us, it would appear, from “the Institute”) remains detached throughout. The Sloe seems an even-tempered revision of some of the myth-making excesses of North-period Heaney, following in its own way the angry reaction of Ciaran Carson in a contemporary review of North in The Honest Ulsterman magazine and the critiques of Heaney found in the poetry of Paul Muldoon.

The even more excessive myth-making of Ted Hughes in Crow is also amiably deflated in Badb, a poem which figured as Riordan’s contribution to a Hughes festschrift published by Faber before his death. Riordan’s speaker encounters a crow in a forest and despite the poem’s title (Badb is a Celtic goddess) the tone of observation is even throughout and wary of imposing a meaning beyond the fact of the bird itself. The poet nonetheless manages to transmute the bird into a creature worthy of our lyric attention. The entire narrative of the poem is simply an observation of the crow fixing its gaze on the speaker’s own, before flying off:

Then she was gone, in a few wing beats
indistinguishable from her fellows wheeling
above the trees, carrying on their business,
neighbourly and otherworldly.

This kind of subtle shift and marrying of the “neighbourly and otherworldly” will be familiar to readers of A Word from the Loki. That previous collection featured many poems which concerned themselves with quietly exploring a domestic world, the finest of which were simply titled Bed and Table. In this, Riordan again resembles Michael Longley who seems to be a presiding spirit over his work. Like Longley, Riordan provides us with a Hellenic cherishing of the domestic and natural world, such as registered in another poem in Floods, The Lettuce, described as “nature’s very own bright-green mandala”.

A number of excellent love poems chart the progress and eventual end of an affair, while Riordan continues to mine a potent seam of poems about childhood memories. As the Faber blurb says, these are all much concerned with “interrogating the book’s epigraph that ‘time is what keeps everything from happening at once”’. Riordan’s treatment of time as an element in poems such as The Rug and Bilberry is reminiscent of Don Paterson in his contemporary classic 11.00 Baldovan or Louis Macneice in the canonic Soapsuds.

The epigraph comes from Chaos Theory for Beginners and poems about science are a notable feature of this collection, perhaps following on from The Real Thing, a poem about Lucretius in A Word from the Loki. The title poem that closes Floods is clearly a relation of The Real Thing and if it is not as effective, we can put that down to the tour-de-force nature of its predecessor. Both these poems are concerned with man’s early conceptions of science and the world, as is The Sphere which imagines Eratosthenes, the first scholar to believe that the world was round. More contemporary concepts in science are also explored and used as means to throw conceits round a poem. This is evident in The Schrödingers’ Cat and On Not Experiencing the Ultraviolet Catastrophe. These last two appear slightly forced perhaps, as if Riordan was auditioning for the most appearances in the next anthology on science and poetry.

However, this opportunity has been restrained by modesty, as Riordan and the science writer Jon Tumey have just published A Quark for Mister Mark which is indeed an anthology on science and poetry. The 101 poems contained therein are an eclectic lot and to be wholly recommended. Many of the names one would associate with science in poetry would appear, such as Lavinia Greenlaw, Edwin Morgan and Miroslav Holub. It is also pleasing to see a number of poems by Robert Frost, a poet who is not often seen as being interested in science. Those who know Frost’s work well, however, will be alive to how his poems approach all manner of subjects and implications in their seemingly homely fashion. To name check another American, it is heartening to see Richard Wilbur receive the recognition he deserves and the three poems that appear should continue to remind us that the former American laureate is a major poet.

There is a canny selection from Tennyson’s In Memoriam which warrants special mention. Tennyson’s treatment of Darwinism in his series of elegies is a powerful testament of how a poet’s engagement with science can produce poetry of the highest order. There is also an excellent epigraph from Yeats which best sums up the sense of wonder at the universe that science reinforces in us:

The wandering earth may be
Only a sudden flaming word,
In clanging space a moment heard,
Troubling the endless reverie.

Invariably there are absences that will disappoint, and I was surprised that among Riordan’s contemporaries there was no room for a poem by Robert Crawford or Jamie McKendrick. Hopefully nonetheless, the release of A Quark for Mister Mark so soon after Floods will considerably boost Riordan’s profile in contemporary poetry. He is a fine writer and both collection and anthology thoroughly deserve our attention.