Our Poem Of The Week is The Flight by Cork poet Maurice Riordan, taken from his new volume of Selected Poems.
Editor 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 his and any generation.
The Flight
For a good half hour this morning, from five
till the mobile's ringtone woke me in a sweat,
I was young again and Mammy was alive.
I was childless, bookless, clueless, setting out
alone, circuitously on my way to Shannon
with assignations and delays – and no passport,
I realised. I phoned home frantic with a plan.
Would Matty bike it to me at the airport?
But I couldn’t keep our mother on the line.
How come you cannot use a phone! I roared.
Then two nieces showed up, grown up, all smiles
in a red MG. I’d no notion who they were.
Yet they took me in. With luck I’d make my flight,
if Mammy now would ring me on my mobile.
Maurice Riordan: Selected Poems is published by Faber
About The Poet: Maurice Riordan was born in 1953 in Lisgoold, Co. Cork. He lived in Canada and Spain before moving to London in the early 1980s. He is editor of A Quark for Mister Mark: 101 Poems About Science and The Finest Music: Early Irish Lyrics in Translation.
