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. 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.

When Love Speaks: Poetry and Prose for Weddings, Relationships and Married Life

Literature & Fiction

O'Riordan, Adam

Poetry

Vintage Classics

A debut collection of stories by a poet with a “painter’s eye for detail and pianist’s touch for sounding the right notes” (Simon Armitage).
Moving from remote, sun-scorched towns to the charged hum of Venice Beach, The Burning Ground is a collection of eight stories populated by men haunted by their past and by their dreams, set against the canvas of California, where beauty and bleakness go hand in hand. In “A Thunderstorm in Santa Monica,” a man’s unmoored lifestyle is reflected back at him after a long flight. In “Black Bear in the Snow,” a divorced advertising executive tries to rekindle a relationship with his son. And in the title story, “The Burning Ground,” a painter is haunted by memories of his former lover. The stories take familiar roles―the deadbeat dad, the drifting divorcé, the wayward man―and bring them new emotional depth, peeling back the layers to reveal interiors both unexpected and arresting in their complexity.
Written with a poet’s lyricism and an outsider’s keen eye, Adam O’Riordan’s insightful work paints an intimate portrait of diverse male lives contending with the potential of the West Coast.

The Burning Ground: Stories

United States

W.W.Norton&Company

“Precise and attentive. O’Riordan has the painter’s eye for detail and the pianist’s touch for sounding the right notes.”―Simon Armitage This startling debut from a young British poet traces the paths from past to present, 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. 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, of history captured in an irrevocable moment.

In the Flesh: Poems

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.

In the Flesh

Chatto&Windus

A Herring Famine

The Burning Ground

Literary

Blomsbury

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Books by O'Riordan, Adam