Reading a poetry collection is like watching a slideshow in silence. If the images are strong enough, they will speak for themselves. Add some form of articulation to the slides, though, music or description, say, and further muscle has been added. The effect is somewhat different.

How appropriate then that Adam O’Riordan’s debut collection, from which he read to a cozy clink of glasses and poetry students’ whispers at Topping and Company bookshop earlier this summer, is titled ‘In the Flesh’. The intense physical atmosphere of his verse has a crafted feel, but is sounded in words that sing when intoned by a voice that just about holds a memory of the poet’s Mancunian roots.

Although O’Riordan offered the occasional insight and explanation to his work, he is a poet who seems profoundly aware of the strength of words themselves. A moment as small as a moth ‘landed between paper tiger and paperweight/on the open dictionary’ is moulded, unapologetically and with a light touch, into a larger metaphor of present loneliness without need of elucidation. In fact, expanding on memories found in old photos and held in decaying buildings, it seems O’Riordan is reluctant to explain lest the poetry no longer stands for itself.

Diffusing through his poetry is a tangible presence of flesh that we can all relate to - finding a lover’s hand in the dark or the feel of a word as it is said - and memories of physical presence now lost. These are articulated in a careful ordering of words that at once balance the hard graft of the poet’s pen and yet possess a natural flow. O’Riordan’s collection is not just one for quiet meditation – that would be only to give it half it’s potential. As his reading proved, his is hard-bodied verse crying to be read out and made flesh.