Poetry and prose for weddings, relationships and married life.

When Love Speaks

There are over 200,000 marriages and 7000 civil partnerships per year. This anthology offers over 100 poems and readings which celebrate love and union.

O'Riordan's fresh eyes have turned up some beautiful bits of writing

The delicate introduction makes falling in love seem like the most sensible way to spend your time

Life is nothing without literature, whether taken in snippets...or in satisfying chunks, like the contents of the new anthology When Love Speaks...plenty to choose from in this collection

Far more, and better, than the routine Valentine's anthology...rings the bells for a garland that revives a stale genre

The collected poems and prose extracts successfully fulfill editor Adam O'Riordan's aim to capture 'some of the strangeness of the wedding day' and other aspects of our love lives.

Adam O'Riordan was born in Manchester in 1982, where he currently lives. In 2008 he became the youngest Poet-in-Residence at The Wordsworth Trust, the Centre for British Romanticism. His first collection In the Flesh (2010) win a Somerset Maugham Award. He is the Academic Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University.

The perfect gift for Valentine’s Day 
 
'And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods 
Makes heaven drowsy with harmony' 
Love's Labour's Lost, William Shakespeare 
 
When Love Speaks brings together the greatest writing on love and commitment - from Donne to Cole Porter, Sappho to P.G. Wodehouse, love letters of the great composers to Edwardian marriage advice. These poems and passages capture high romance and everyday happiness, feverish first love and tender union. This joyful anthology provides a range of unique and inspiring readings for a wedding or civil ceremony. 
 
Selected by the poet Adam O'Riordan

In the Flesh

Confident, seductive, and thrillingly assured, an enthralling introduction to one of our most exciting new British poets.

Precise and attentive, O'Riordan has the painter's eye for detail and the pianist's touch for sounding the right notes

These musical, deftly patterned poems are the products of a determined intelligence.  They make for a convincing and sustained debut

This collection does not read like a debut. It has an established feel - as if Adam O'Riordan, who is in his mid-20s, had been around for decades. Only that makes him sound dusty, and he isn't. The unfashionable beauty of this collection - shining, musical, aloof - is that it is intimate without being confessional... This collection is a most finished beginning

Adam O'Riordan brings an understated music to poems of birth, death and love, proving that novelty needn't be ostentatious. His poem on 'The Leverets', "Clawed from its nest into the cold world / sudden and bright and, in an instant, over", stopped me in my tracks.

In the Flesh is an auspicious debut, full of unforgettable lines and hard-won insights. Adam O'Riordan is the real thing

Easily one of the best poetry collections in the past decade

Shifts in focus and perspective allow for a fresh and engaging exploration of time-honoured themes. This descriptive and imaginative daring makes In the Flesh a persuasive debut

Adam O'Riordan's remarkable first collection traces the hidden paths from past to present, from the lost to the living, seeking familiarity in a world of 'false trails and disappearing acts'. Here relatives, friends and other absences are coaxed into life and urgently pressed on the reader as they surface, in the flesh. 
 
Journeys begin with indelible detail and open into new and astonishing landscapes of the head and the heart. Whether in graceful elegies for the dead or the charged lyrics of love and desire, poems cross space as well as time, from the 'blackened lung' of Victorian Manchester and the fateful events of the 1913 Derby, to enter a modern era of satellites and late night searches for lost lovers. At the heart of the collection lies the sonnet sequence 'Home', a slant look at the lives of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, intersected by more recent, sometimes unsettling, personal portraits. 
 
Clear-eyed and sensuous, these are poems linked by a strong sense of place and presence, longing and loss; of history captured in an irrevocable moment. In the Flesh is a startling debut from one of our finest young British poets.

Adam O'Riordan

In poems of poised lyricism, the book revealed an obsession with the line between beauty and violence, but also a fear of erasure, finding consolation in poetry’s potential to commemorate and commit to memory… Like Heaney’s, O’Riordan’s best poems reveal an unusually precise attention to the texture, weight and subtle music of language. “Glance from the barrel where the bones are bled”, begins “Ghost Ranch”. Read those lines of O’Riordan’s aloud and they force your whole mouth into movement, a trick that the Irish master all but perfected, bringing language to life… O’Riordan has a genuine gift.

Adam O'Riordan's poems combine verbal grace with powerful feelings and a keen intelligence that extends from the personal to the political with admirable ease

Elegant, beautifully-turned poems that match an easy technique with a sophisticated intelligence

Adam O’Riordan is the real thing

The poems of this dazzling second collection are of contradictory impulses: of abundance and famine, of absence and presence, of endings and new beginnings. Here again are the intelligent, elegant and emotionally potent poems that are O’Riordan’s trademark, yet pushes into bolder territories, from a herring famine of 1907 to the Strangeways Prison Riot of 1990. 
 
Bounding place and time, and urging into being both the living and the dead, this crystalline collection captures the struggle, folly and wonder of the human heart.

Adam O'Riordan

Praise for A Herring Famine

In poems of poised lyricism, the book revealed an obsession with the line between beauty and violence, but also a fear of erasure, finding consolation in poetry’s potential to commemorate and commit to memory… Like ...

Adam O'Riordan's poems combine verbal grace with powerful feelings and a keen intelligence that extends from the personal to the political with admirable ease

Elegant, beautifully-turned poems that match an easy technique with a sophisticated intelligence

In poems of poised lyricism, the book revealed an obsession with the line between beauty and violence, but also a fear of erasure, finding consolation in poetry’s potential to commemorate and commit to memory… Like ...

Adam O'Riordan's poems combine verbal grace with powerful feelings and a keen intelligence that extends from the personal to the political with admirable ease

Elegant, beautifully-turned poems that match an easy technique with a sophisticated intelligence

In poems of poised lyricism, the book revealed an obsession with the line between beauty and violence, but also a fear of erasure, finding consolation in poetry’s potential to commemorate and commit to memory… Like ...

Adam O'Riordan's poems combine verbal grace with powerful feelings and a keen intelligence that extends from the personal to the political with admirable ease

Elegant, beautifully-turned poems that match an easy technique with a sophisticated intelligence

Books by Adam O'Riordan

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