Maurice Riordan's Floods is prefaced by a quotation from Chaos for Beginners: "Time is what keeps everything from happening at once." Riordan's previous book, A Word from the Loki, was characterised by narratives which considered the possibility that mere chance is a universal rule. Floods tends to see disorder held in check only by fragile surfaces and, as a result, Riordan's poetry is by turns thoughtful, playful and serious. Floods, which is now short-listed for the Whitbread poetry award, is enthrallingly tense as it tries to make sense of how the patterns of life can veer between the unnervingly arbitrary and the cold comfort of the absolutely logical.
The poems in Floods are unashamed of their own contemporariness, with references ranging from quantum theory to Ryan Giggs and designer labels. Riordan, is able to hold these together with more traditional themes by allowing such apparently ephemeral items to exist as parts of what he calls "our century's laws". So when he begins to write about his mother he can move from the everydayness of "The Rug", in which she scolds him as a child, and then touchingly backtracks to the haunting near-mythology of "The Boy Who Turned Into Stag". In this latter poem the "mother calls to her only son/across the distances" and wants him to "set the place to rights again". The mother's desire for an order that can be brought by her son is only one in an impressive range of parent/child relations that Riordan imagines, and that is exemplary of his poetry's insistence on a contradictory range of possibilities in how we imagine ourselves and think of each other.
Given his interest in "surfaces" it is not surprising that Riordan's poetry can itself sometimes appear a little superficial. Some of the shorter poems in this collection could pass by unnoticed. "Caroline Songs" seems at first like a misplaced attempt to be lyrical in the midst of more cerebral work, but its series of almost-bad rhymes and awkward scansions repay re-reading. The deliberate discord is in keeping with the ex-lover's voice and, as the sounds of the poem reverberate, a distinctive and surprising note of anger emerges.
But Riordan's poetry is at its most successful when it layers thought over emotion. "Caisson" is a variation on the ancient tempus fugit theme, cleverly catching the music of Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress": "Then at your undressing, I would be,/Plunged in a runic chemistry". Here metaphysics meet quantum physics, and Riordan's obsession with detail takes on a greater resonance.
Riordan tells subdued but menacing stories while thinking big. Floods is intriguing, experimental and written with a confidence which is curiously reassuring given the imminent, unnamed catastrophe which the poems try hard not to imagine.
Colin Graham is lecturer in Irish Writing at Queen's University, Belfast