"I've said jokingly to people that when I was young and wondering whether to try my hand at writing poetry that I felt that there was no vacancy there. Not for someone with my subject matter or from my background." The speaker is Cork-born Maurice Riordan (47), whose second collection of poetry, Floods (Faber) has been nominated for the Whitbread Prize. "Seamus Heaney had done it one way. And Paul Muldoon had completely transformed it. That was intimidating!"
Reading Riordan's work, this anxiety of influence is understandable. There are shades of Heaney's "Toland Man" in the very first poem in the volume, "Sloe", about a perfectly-preserved sloe that was found beside the carcass of a stone-age man in Austria in 1991. And poem after poem recalls shared agricultural labour with family members now deceased. "There are allusions to rural life in Heaney and Muldoon, which I suspect would have little immediacy for someone without that background. But to me they have phenomenal immediacy. Recognising these experiences also gives rise to a problem: how do you create your own space?"
Riordan's solution has been to use his sense of his past to focus attention on the future, however ill-assorted the two may seem. He left Ireland in the late 1970s for McMaster University in Canada where he wrote a doctoral thesis on the poetry of Austin Clarke. Today he teaches poetry in an adult education college in south London. And the life he leads in London - almost unimaginably different from the life he knew in his native Lisgoold - is part and parcel of his verse.
"I haven't exactly put down roots here. But my children's roots are here. South London is not a place I expected to end up living in. I got to know it in circumstances of constrained domesticity and gradually I found a way of writing about it. I'm glad it's become part of my imagination, glad of the confidence I have now that it too is my own."
Riordan's London emerges best, perhaps, in a poem like "Make Believe" with its references to Waterloo, the Elephant (short for Elephant and Castle) and the ramp at Blackfriars station. "Make Believe" describes a couple, about to separate for good, having a row. The cityscape, minutely described, becomes a historical setting for this important moment in the speaker's life.
For the centrepiece of Floods, Riordan moves away from London, however, and offers a version of the Hungarian poet Ferenc Juhasz's magnificent poem "The Boy Turned into a Stag": "I thought of it as a Hungarian `Great Hunger'," says Riordan. "It has an emotional extremism that I wanted to capture without any confidence I'd be able to do so. I also wanted to emulate its expressionistic technique. The original poem was greatly admired by Auden and was, I believe, translated by Ted Hughes but the translation may be lost. So what I've done is perhaps unforgivable, since I've stolen a ride on its rhetoric and plundered its homebrew of science and autobiography!"
This espousal of a more fractured, expressionistic idiom marks a move away from the narrative precision of his last volume. A Word from the Loci (1995) was justly praised for stories that unfold with dizzying rapidity against a background of constant suspense, often with intimations of imminent disaster.
"A writer I was very influenced by was Ian McEwan," says Riordan. "In A Child in Time, a father loses his daughter in a supermarket and that's that. There's no redemption here. It's that kind of unrelenting Hitchcockian narrative that I wanted to manipulate. Another short story writer who I think has influenced me is Alice Munro - and the violence of the change from leading one life to another is dramatised by shifts in the temporal perspective of the narrative. Sometimes she'll go back into her parents' world or her grandparents' world. I think that's something I'm inclined to do.
"But in this volume I wanted the narrative struts to be looser. I recover my composure, however, for the title poem; `Floods' began life as a tongue-in-cheek millennial poem, but I became so engrossed by the speaker of the poem that it went on and on." The narrator is supposed to be a Roman of the "late Stoic school". "In antiquity several books were written about the Nile (nothing was a greater source of wonder) but all of them are lost, except part of a prose work by Seneca. And so in Floods I saw myself `translating' a lost book, written at the start of our era by a Roman colonist near Alexandria. The speaker is a broken-hearted, almost humourless Roman, trying to place his personal fate in an unmeasurable world.
"We're only just recovering the value of being interested in the future as well as the past. Ten years ago people used to talk about `The End of History'. There was a general feeling that you couldn't concern yourself with what would happen after that. I found that puzzling, because I don't find it difficult to imagine a future. I don't mean that I think I know what the future will be like. But I do know that things will go on, however differently." And that faith is what the speaker of Floods upholds.
With a prize fund of £40,000, the Whitbread Prizes are Britain's most valuable literary awards. There are category prizes worth £3,500 each for best novel, best first novel, best biography and best collection of poetry, and the overall winner is awarded a further £22,500. In addition to Riordan, the poetry category shortlist includes Scotsman John Burnside for The Asylum Dance (Cape Poetry), New York-born Michael Donaghy for Conjure (Picador), R. F. Langley from Staffordshire for his Collected Poems (Carcanet), and the Anglo-American poet Anne Stevenson for Granny Scarecrow (Bloodaxe). The Guardian has tipped Riordan to win the poetry category.
The winner of the poetry award has gone on to win the Book of the Year award in each of the last two years. Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf scooped the award last year and Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters gained a posthumous accolade the year before that; so there may be pressure this year to crown a book from a different category. Highly fancied among the London literati are Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans (from the novel category), and Ian Kershaw for the second volume of his biography, Hitler.
What does Riordan make of all this attention? "Well, when people ask me that I like to quote something attributed to Borges. `In Argentina we think a book might still be worth reading even if it has won a literary prize'." He is entitled to this evasion: Floods is a joy to read, whether it wins or not.
The winner of the Whitbread category prizes will be announced on Thursday and the overall winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year award will be announced in a televised ceremony on January 23rd
