Edited by Roddy Lumsden , and tall-lighthouse press’s Pilot series is an exciting, enterprising and much-needed addition to the world of poetry publishing: showcasing the work of eighteen up-and-coming and wonderfully varied poets, all under the age of thirty. Adam O’Riordan is one of the first to receive the Pilot treatment, and his wonderful pamphlet showcases the fruition of his years studying under both Andrew Motion and the late great Michael Donaghy. The first thing you notice in reading this selection of O’Riordan’s work is the sheer ambition and range of his subject matter. Opener ‘Trawling’ takes the sweeping birds eye view of Larkin’s ‘Here’ to the zooming precision of the ‘Google Earth’ level: encompassing the ‘satellite / as it travels in Trappist silence’ through to a coffee cup ‘slid[ing] along the galley’ of a ‘lonely trawler’; ‘the smell of spilt diesel, fish guts, / blood and brine, gravity in flux’. The off-kilter half rhyme here is perfectly executed: the reader get
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