NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

Very worthily this poet, in probably a late first collection has been supported and it is refreshing to see new work which takes no refuge in clipped lines or personal vulgarities. With a scholarship to study under Andrew Motion at the University of London, where he was awarded the inaugural Peters Fraser and Dunlop prize and in 2006 a writer's award from the Arts Council there is more than enough dynamite behind the current small collection of 16 poems.

The title takes life from MANCHESTER, his birth-place:

	Queen of the cotton cities
	nightly I piece you back into existence:

	In the small hours I remake you and remake you,
	until you grow faint as a footfall on a fever ward

	and I wake from my imagination's gas-lit parlour
	and whatever I seek to have or hold or harbour

	is pure curio — a wreath of feathers, seashells
	or human hair, a taxidermist's diorama.

	Our blinds half lowered like eyelids before a kiss,
	as if this room strains to reconstruct you
	between the white walls of its memory.

	Set between the Preacher and the Prophet,
	this is the hissing bootleg for the fanatic,
	this is the one hit on the concept album,
	never the same after the frontman left.

	Who wrote this song

	Who, unaccompanied,
	recorded the tender geometry of lovers
	that to this day remains on tracing paper pages
	in bedside tables

Other poems are as variable in subject as HEELS, commencing with its connection with fetishism for perverts, from THE LONG COUNT showing the influence of a videotape shaping the childhood of Mike Tyson.

There is no evidence that QUEEN OF THE COTTON CITIES is other than a first collection,and with just 16 poems one might conclude that the poet's output of this kind of valuable poems is small or else the publishers intend a follow-up to this 'pilot' volume. In any case I strongly support more exposure to the public of O'Riordan's work.