Last week Adam O’Riordan won the Somerset Maugham Award for his debut collection In The Flesh (Chatto Poetry, £10), one of the most eagerly anticipated collections of British poetry in recent memory. I’ve been hoping to interview O’Riordan for Molossus since covering his Wordsworth Trust pamphlet Home, which contained the poem ‘Silver Lake,’ about our home neighborhood. Fortunately O’Riordan is frequently in Los Angeles for business, and three weeks ago we met for coffee at his Spanish-style apartment in West Hollywood. The following conversation took place by email, as O’Riordan prepared for his trip to London to receive his award.
DS
As a poet who has spent considerable time in the States—and, perhaps more significantly, outside of just New York—I wonder what contemporary American poets you most admire. What’s your take on the literary scene here, compared to Britain?
I love Richard Wilbur’s work. I think Mayflies is a beautifully wrought collection. The San Francisco Chronicle called it a ‘luminous coda’ after Wilbur won the Pulitzer for his New and Selected, which I think sums it up well. His poem ‘This Pleasing Anxious Being’ moves so elegantly backwards and forwards through time and line by line it amasses a force that I think is exemplary. That description of the snow as he’s driving to Baltimore with his parents at Christmastime, ‘which thumps against the windshield / Like earth tossed down upon a coffin lid’.
What British poets deserve better acknowledgement here? And what about American poets there? Obviously, outside the usual suspects: Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heaney, Billy Collins, Kay Ryan…
Irish poets seem to have a much easier time crossing the Atlantic. In Britain last decade or so has been notable for the quality of a number of Scottish poets, Robin Robertson, Don Paterson, Kathleen Jamie are all incredibly gifted and form the kernel of what I suspect, in time, will be looked on as a golden generation of Scottish poets. Adam Foulds is another writer I admire. He wrote the verse novella The Broken Word about the Mau Mau uprising that took place in Kenya in the 1950s that showed the possibilities of the form. I would add Frances Leviston to that list too. Her poem ‘Humbles’ about hitting a deer a night when driving is breathtakingly good.
A lot of your poems are about places—how does place inspire your poetry? I’m especially interested because the poems so often display a deep rootedness, despite their abundance of locations.
I think it was probably part of my upbringing. I remember my father, who is an historian by training and who was a trade unionist and a socialist as a young man, taking me to see the sight of the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester when I was very young. I suppose growing up in a largely atheist household, aside from a few sentimental vestiges of Catholicism on my mother’s part, meant that intellectual and specifically historical understanding was a source succor and a kind of default way of engaging with the world.
The other thing that really sticks out to me is the way you use objects to chronicle or channel lives lived, in an almost talismanizing way. Your series Home, written while you were in residence at the Wordsworth Trust, is a great example. No real question there, but maybe you could comment on your take?
Again it probably goes back to the historical thing. Though I suspect maybe it’s also a design thing. My older brother is an architect and my mother a devotee of William Morris, so things were always as important as ideas in our house.
You write sonnets. Which sonneteers, contemporary or not, do you most admire? What attracts you to the form?
I think the simplicity and the discipline of the sonnet is one of the draws for me. The sonnet only really began to work for me when I used it in conjunction with narrative. Andrew Motion recently wrote a sonnet sequence called ‘The Five Acts of Harry Patch’ about the last surviving British combatant in World War I, which I admire. Motion, as he showed during his laureateship, is such a magnificently accomplished elegist.
You were the youngest poet to ever win a residency at the Wordsworth Trust. What was it like to be in Grasmere, among Wordsworth’s things? I think I would go mad up there; too rural.
Although Grasmere is fairly remote—two trains and then a taxi ride (or an open-top bus for the hardy) from London—there were visiting scholars and researchers passing through and every summer poets come up as part of the reading series. I had some very special moments of quiet privilege; walking alone in the bluebell woods at dawn in spring, or listening to carols sung inside a candle-lit Dove Cottage on a winter night or swimming in Sour Milk ghyll the morning Barack Obama was elected.
Is “Silver Lake” set in my Silver Lake, the editorial headquarters of Molossus?
Yes.
What are you working on now? What are you reading, watching, listening to?
I’m finishing a book of stories set in California.
When I write I listen to piano music mainly, especially a recording of the French pianist Alexandre Tharaud playing pieces by Francois Couperin. I noticed Terrence Malik had used it in trailer for The Tree of Life. There’s an English modern jazz group, Portico Quartet, who use a kind of steel pan made in Switzerland called a ‘hang’ to make incredibly haunting music. I listen to them when I write too. Sparklehorse is the band I feel most deeply connected to. My brother brought back a tape from San Francisco when I was 14 with Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot on one side and a band called Sebedoh on the other. When Mark Linkous shot himself in the heart in an alleyway in Knoxville it felt like the end of my youth.
Congratulations on the new collection, the Somerset Maugham, and all your recent successes. I hope to see more of your work on Molossus soon.
June 2011
