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Maurice Riordan was born in 1953 and grew up on a farm in Lisgoold, County. Cork. After reading English and Latin at University College, Cork, he spent five years in Canada, writing his PhD at McMaster University. He has held teaching positions in Barcelona, Cork and London where he now lives, reviewing on a part-time basis and chairing a poetry workshop at Morley College. His first collection, A Word from the Loki, was published last year by Faber to great critical acclaim and was a Poetry Book Society Choice in 1995.

I suppose I would have been about twenty. I went to university basically to study English. I was there a couple of years when I started writing poems, suddenly. And that was the beginning of it really. I didn’t actually continue. I didn’t feel the stuff was getting any better, so...it was something that went underground in my life after a couple of years.

Who were your influences at that stage?

At that stage I would have thought Ted Hughes, perhaps Theodore Roethke. And probably some Irish poets as well, probably Patrick Kavanagh. I hadn’t read that much contemporary poetry.

Were any early poems published in student journals or elsewhere?

Yes. I won a little prize at university, shared with Paul Durcan, so I started quite well. The poem that won the prize was noticed by the poet, John Montague, who was teaching us at the time, and he was quite excited, or at least pleased, by it. And I published a poem in one of the national newspapers. Then there were a couple of other things in small magazines, but that was about it, really.

What made you start again? Was Canada a good environment?

No. I completely stopped when I was there. I was doing a PhD on an Irish poet called Austin Clarke. It was a fairly rigorous programme and it didn’t leave much time for other things. The whole environment was very academic. When I’d finished the PhD, I did start writing a little bit again there. Tentatively, not very confidently.

Did you get any encouragement for your poetry from your family background?

No. My father said I should work in a bank - and he wasn’t thinking of T S Eliot. Though Cork itself is quite a literary place and crawling with poets.

In the title poem of your collection, A Word from the Loki, you use anthropological jargon, but playfully.

Yes. I remember the first time I took it to a workshop. Someone else read the poem and, while he was reading it, everybody started laughing for that reason. It’s a pastiche, really. Somebody said it was a bit like a Channel 4 documentary, and a bit of mimicry did come into it. But I was interested in using a pseudo-scientific register. It was the first time I’d really done that. I’d been building up to it, but didn’t think of myself as mimicking the narrator of a documentary, yet it did come out a bit like that. I suppose it’s a way of distancing myself from the material. And I did enjoy the element of mimicry all right.

It could have been merely funny, but there is something held in reserve, isn’t there? The ‘wistful and eerie’ qualities remarked on by John Fuller.

Yes, that’s something I was conscious of all right - you know, kind of modulating the language. It begins with that fussy, almost pedantic kind of register, then its as if the narrator’s affected by what he’s recording. So it becomes a way of reflecting some very romantic ideas, yet of slightly disguising them, I suppose, and expressing a train of thought that it would be difficult to do in a straight romantic register.

Would you say it’s more detached from your personal experience, and less autobiographical, than other poems in the collection, like ‘Time Out’?

Not really, no. I always think there’s an autobiographical pressure behind the poems. But when they really start for me, they start with a fictional tangent. I mean, it’s true for example that I have two children and that I spent quite a bit of time minding them on my own when they were small. So the anxiety in the poem is one I would have experienced. And it came about very much as the poem itself says: I heard this item on the news which put the wind up me, as it were. But I also had an idea that this might be subject matter for a poem - hearing that and using that as a little wedge to get at quite personal material. But a fictional wedge. The actual scenario of the poem, the house, the television set, are not like that. The house I live in doesn’t have any upstairs, but there’s an upstairs in the poem.

‘Time Out’ is a bit like a screenplay. It resembles the structure of an earlier poem, ‘Flitcraft’, which you have said was inspired by an episode from The Maltese Falcon.

It was actually inspired by the novel - a very good novel, by the way. The little bit it takes off from is only in the book, not in the film. But I was interested in a kind of filmic narrative. And I think Time Out very much exploits that idea: there are little things in it reminiscent of the ‘time-cuts’ you get in films.

You seem to like imagining disastrous scenarios, then luxuriate in the fact that they haven’t happened to you.

[laughs] Yes, in both of these poems we’ve talked about, I think there’s some kind of magic, an element of the talismanic, the prophylactic charm. Time Out reminds us that the world out there isn’t a safe place. It has suggestions of improvidence or carelessness, the unmade bed, not knowing your neighbours, the milk left on the doorstep. It’s a cautionary poem, but with a very simple moralistic basis, which is just ‘Be more careful’. That’s why the cigarettes come into it. It’s a poem that says ‘Give up smoking’ too.

You’ve written that your poetry ‘started to happen’ with ‘Nickname’ written 12 years ago and the oldest in the collection. How was it a new departure?

It ties in with what I was saying earlier. My first influences were rhetorical, and the important influence for me before I wrote a poem like Nickname would have been Robert Frost. I became convinced that poetry should be natural and spoken, and the first poems that are in the book from that period are quite Frostian.

Is he still a strong influence?

With influences, I keep myself open to them all the time and will continue to do so. As far as the book is concerned, the whole idea of the spoken and narrative are firmly entrenched in my way of working up to now, and I suspect that will remain the case. Frost is a master of telling a story that is layered, with various resonances underneath which can be very symbolic.

Like the word ‘Loki’ Is that the Norse god?

No, only to the extent that I realised that I was using his name. But he’s the trickster god, so that seemed to fit in with the ludic aspect.

Do you agree with Frost’s definition of the poem as ‘a momentary stay against confusion’?

Yes, that’s often how I experience the writing of poems. They just open up for a while this clear space, and you feel briefly clarified and eloquent. Somewhere behind the whole idea of writing, for me, is some notion of perfect eloquence. And poems are intimations of that, I suppose.

At what stage did you find your own poetic voice?

I would say that there was a process of finding my voice. But I’d also say that I would think of my voice as modulating, even changing, from poem to poem. I’m not one for sticking to the same voice, as it were. I’m one of those poets who needs to have a sense of change. To what extent it happens or not, I don’t know. But certainly that poem you mentioned - Nickname - was one which felt very comfortable in my mouth, and I used it for a long time as a kind of paradigm poem, one which I would go back to and read again, and sometimes write out again, just to feel myself back to what is most natural to me. Quite a lot of those shorter little narratives in the book follow on from that. But really, it’s much later on that I’d be more confident and feel I can move the language around a bit. I think that a poem called Fish was the first time I really felt ‘I can kick the football around now’.

Many writers write out of a sense of trauma, but you seem to write out of stability.

I think I write out of a sense of mental stability - I should touch wood when I say that - out of a sense of confidence and trust in the medium, which is occasional, temporary and fragile. I feel that kind of pressure all right. Certainly, before I write, there is a respite from that, but it closes in pretty quickly again. So there is a kind of calmness about the poems themselves.

You’ve written elsewhere of the ‘original village’ you say you want to build a bridge from? Is that life as it was when you were a child?

I think so. The village is the world as first known and lost in that form.

Nostalgia for innocence or for the past as ‘the foreign country’ where ‘they do things differently’ as L P Hartley puts it?

Maybe it’s just a sense of integration and community, and it’s ahistorical with no sense of the trespass of history. History’s there, I suppose, but not in a violent or violating way. What I may be recollecting is the child’s innocence of history - of the fact that change happens and is disruptive. To some extent, it ties up the two ends of the book. You have some sense of a small village community in some of those short early poems; and then roughly the same scenario, in a completely different context, in the title poem.

And this ‘tribe’ you describe, with its strange arbitrary rituals, is it an allegorical way of talking about Ireland?

When I was writing it, there was no consciousness of anything like that. All it was was just a sense of a tribe on a riverbank - a picture In the mind - and, wanting to write about them. And getting the beginning and end of the poem, and wanting to write a narrative from A to B. I had a big gap in the middle and I didn’t think I would ever fill it up. I wrote the poem in a very haphazard way and didn’t think it would come to anything, and it was only when it was very nearly finished that I had any feeling that I had finished a poem that I’d keep. But about Ireland: one thing that did stray into my mind when I was writing the poem - the part where

the proximity of danger is heralded
by a despondency that seems to strike
without visible cause but which effects
a swift change among a people by nature
brave and practical, bringing to a stop
in a matter of hours all work, play, talk

well, I do remember, when I was writing that part of the poem, thinking ‘this is a bit like the way Matthew Arnold described the Celts’. So I suppose that somewhere at the periphery of the poem is just what you were saying: the idea that the Loki are from my native people in some sense. But it’s not an allegory; I think that probably requires a more conscious sort of construction.

You’ve been here a long time. How ethnically Irish do you feel?

I don’t really think about it that much. I suppose one community I definitely belong to in London is the literary community, and some are Irish, some are not.

In your review of Heaney’s The Redress of Poetry in Poetry London Newsletter you seem, in a tongue-in-cheek way, to dissociate yourself from the political: ‘my one unambiguous allegiance,’ you say, ‘is to Scottish independence.’ Do politics have no role in your poetry?

[laughs] There are different types of political gesture, from throwing a brick through the window of Parliament to refusing to register to vote. I think probably - certainly - there’s no overt political side to my work. And it’s not that I specifically object to that, it’s just that I’ve never done it and, as of now, don’t see myself actually doing it.

Have you ever been reproached, like Heaney, for not adopting a partisan stance?

It’s a bit different for poets in the North of Ireland - a different type of pressure in their lives. One of the reasons I do dissociate myself is simply that poets in the North of Ireland are inevitably much better qualified to write about the political situation. On the other hand, what I say about Scottish independence is a little bit sly. It’s true - but part of the reason I feel that is: if the United Kingdom were broken up in that way, this would create the possibility of a much more flexible political entity for the British Isles as a whole. So I do have political views and I do see that there has always been a mixture of cultures in this rough geographical unit.

How do you see your poetry developing since your first book?

Well, I reckon I’m about a third of the way into a second collection, and two things seem to have happened. One is that I have gone ahead with the narrative thing, but it has changed. In the first book I was very interested in A to B narratives, a direct line from A to B. Now I’m more interested in something that’s a bit more involuted. There tend to be time changes, little bits and pieces from current scientific theory about time, and so on, getting worked Into the poem. These are short poems, but I feel there might be something more in this, a different kind of slightly wriggling narrative. I’d like to do something like that because I’m a bit dissatisfied with the relationship between simple narrative and complicated life. Also, I think that possibly one of the good things in my poems is a vividness of detail. So I’d like to combine this realism with a more perplexing structure - that’s the gleam in my eye!

Sounds a bit like the Riordan X-Files, particularly with the time shifts?

I don’t see it as particularly original, I wish it were. I’ve a tendency, if I do one thing, to want to do something different and possibly the opposite of it. After I’d finished the book, I did these very lyrical rhymed songs and this was very important psychologically to me. I thought at least they’re completely different to what I’ve done before.

What attracted you to the 17th century Caroline poets, Lovelace and Suckling?

As a reader, I’ve always loved the lyrical purity in English. I don’t know other languages, but it’s always seemed to me extraordinary that English, the language I speak, can have this kind of purity. I’ve always had the feeling that this is what poetry really is, and the wish to write in a very lyrical style. On the other hand, even though they are very lyrical (and I go for that very pure strain of lyricism you get in the seventeenth century), I throw in with that a bit of contemporary detail. So it’s like an identical kind of love affair taking place now, but using these lyrical forms.

The other thing that interests me is that, generally in my poems, I like playing with registers of the language a bit. I remember, when I was writing that pseudo-scientific anthropological stuff in the last book, thinking: ‘there’s one thing here I know about and that’s how to mix registers’. This isn’t strictly speaking mixing registers, but I’m using a traditional format with a lot of contemporary language. I’d open the book and I’d say ‘the Lovelace looks funny - just the physical shape on the page’. One point of comparison is that the poems I’ve done look quite shaped and elaborate: long lines, short lines, lots of refrains, and little internal repetitions like “even as...” for linking.

Why go so far back to find lyrical inspiration? Is there nothing in our own century?

There are a couple I like: Housman, for example. But his lyricism isn’t as tough or exciting as the older stuff. Nobody’s doing that much nowadays, but it has been done. Auden did quite a lot and he’s something of a model for these poems too the ones that are in the Faber booklet based on Four Weddings and a Funeral. And James Fenton, to some extent, though he does it differently and it’s a very different kind of music. But Auden was very much in my mind and I did reread him when I was writing these poems.

How do you see the poet’s role in the last years of this century and looking forward to the next?

The role of the poet is always the same and that is to write the best poems he or she can write. I don’t go in very much for millennial ideas myself. But a lot of people do and so, even if there’s no actual basis for the idea, the fact that so many people are interested in to does create a kind of expectancy. And I do feel quite excited about poetry in the next few years because I think there’s a new openness about how it’s written and also a new openness about what’s available to write about. Things really have changed a lot from about ten years ago, when I was starting out on my own grown-up writing.