Jack Underwood’s selection from Maurice Riordan’s work over the last forty years allows us to rediscover a poet whose musicality, wit and emotional acuity rank him as a leading poet of this and any generation.

Responding to the imaginative range of Riordan’s preoccupations, Underwood creates a dynamic arrangement for poems rooted in particularities of time and place, yet enduring in their audacious inventions and pungent ironies. They are compelling in their immediacy, whether they evoke a childhood in rural Co. Cork, describe a remote community that has taken to the treetops to sing, or itemise the novelties and effronteries of aging. Riordan’s work appears here as it demands to be read: as at once contemporary and timeless, vibrant with the anxieties and pleasures of being alive in the here and now.