Poem of the week: Gravel by Maurice Riordan

For Frank

I, too, will spend an hour playing with the gravel.
Sorting and cleaning it. It does love the dirt.
Dead leaves, grit, seeds that can sprout. And it hides
the odd slug or worm. We can’t be having that!
Some of these stones have come a great distance.

I can no longer tell which are from Uist or Orkney.
And there’s one that came from a mountain in Sarawak.
Could it be this basalt with the twinkle of schist?
A shame. It’s somehow joined the rabble tipped
here one morning from the Travis Perkins lorry.

I’m acting the snob! Each and every anonymous stone
has its captive soul, its own fixed little being.
And stones are time travellers. They start out in lake or esker,
or on the seafloor having housed small creatures.
The very tips of the Himalayas are limestone.

All these mute souls, who can tell their journeys…
How can I be their god! I’m too bald to be a saviour.
Though for an hour we’ll sift them through our hands.
Each one – like the last poems of Celan – born dark.
Each one condemned for the duration of the earth.

Maurice Riordan’s genial, intimate tone in Gravel registers at once in the first-name-only dedication and an unqualified agreement with the dedicatee that “I, too, will spend an hour playing with the gravel. / Sorting and cleaning it.” Although the thought of the poem will extend vastly beyond the tactile, that sensation comes first to hand, easily shared and imagined. No figurative elaboration attends it: the verbs do the work (“playing with”, “[s]orting”, “cleaning”) and the full-stops pace the absorbed, leisurely processes. At this stage we don’t know how seriously the poem will take itself – a pleasure often to be found in Riordan’s work. There’s a withdrawal into irony, a focus on the gravel’s attraction to “dirt” and a self-mocking, undertone regarding “the odd slug or worm: / “We can’t be having that!” The suggestion that the stones deserve a little respect in view of the “great distance” some have covered, is somehow lit by a lingering wry smile.

Interestingly, while the poem expands and intensifies in the subsequent verses, the persona continues interlacing it with moments of ironical self-perception. Now he admits to being unable to “tell” any longer from which countries individual stones originate – countries which range from the Outer Hebrides to Malaysia.

The possible stone from Sarawak (“this basalt with the twinkle of schist?”) has “somehow joined the rabble”, the heap of gravel provided by a commercial producer, Travis Perkins. Might the unsorted stones suggest the displacement and eventual effacement of human individuality through the effects of migration?

Again, there’s a self-scolding. The next verse suggests attention to hierarchies might be the issue: “I’m acting the snob!” But then, in an untroubled shift to a more serious, passionate register, the poet declares that “[e]ach and every anonymous stone / has its captive soul, its own fixed little being.” No analogy and no apology are needed: the reader is entrusted with the concept of “soul”, and we in turn trust the poet to wield the concept, and the necessity of such concepts, without any ironical sneer or diminution of scientific fact.

The facts are indeed integral to the vision of the stones as “time travellers”. Their migration is plainly and perfectly described in the concluding lines of verse 3. “They start out in lake or esker” and re-emerge at “the very tips of the Himalayas” as limestone, composed of mud, sand and fragments of shell.

Although a trace of self-mockery continues, the mood is chastened in the last verse. The reminder of Paul Celan and, possibly, the prose-fragments brought together as Microliths, intensifies the shadow, reiterates the hints of persecution and displacement. In a particularly resonant simile, each stone is “born dark” – like Celan’s last poems. Celan describes his poetry as “grey” in Microliths. I don’t think Riordan’s poem is “about” poetry: it might, though, hint at some essential impersonality in poetry, and perhaps in language itself. And some essential durability? I wouldn’t be sure.

Beings with souls may require a god, but, Riordan protests, how can a bald man volunteer for the role of “god” or “saviour”? So we’re left, un-stone-like, with the shudder many of us feel against the very idea of eternity. In the poem’s last line, each “mute soul”, each stone, is “condemned for the duration of the earth”. But the rhetorical question raised in the first line sends its echo, too, through the rest of the poem. It embodies a mystery not unconnected with modest human activity when it asks, concerning the stones, “…who can tell their journeys?” If anyone can, it’s Maurice Riordan, in poetry that inches and twists its dialect-agile way through the gravel of glints, whispers, facts and jokes, to rise to the ever-shifting immensity of “telling”.

Maurice Riordan was born in 1953 in Lisgoold, Ireland. Gravel is from his new Selected Poems, chosen by Jack Underwood (Faber £14.99) and was first published in the 2021 collection Shoulder Tap (Faber £10.99).