As the youngest person ever to be offered the position of Poet-in-Residence at the Wordsworth Trust, Adam O’Riordan has a lot to be pleased about. There’s also his first collection, In the Flesh (from which he read), which won in 2011 won a Somerset Maugham Award, given to the Society of Authors’ choice for the best book published that year by a writer under 35. He is, in other words, hot (literary) property. O’Riordan represents something that many student writers long to one day be – successful, critically acclaimed, regularly featured in The Guardian, and friends with Carol Ann Duffy.

This reading was a reminder of the force of the spoken word. Hearing a writer read their work, the poetry is personalized in the least glib sense; as well as personal prefaces to work that can often seem oblique. And a line like ‘a palpitation shot from heart to scrotum’ was always going to work better spoken aloud than on the page.

There’s also the fact that O’Riordan’s work lives up to the hype. He opened with the first poem in the collection, which addresses Manchester, ‘Queen of the cotton cities/Nightly I piece you back into existence’ – very much at ease, O’Riordan clearly enjoys reading his work. The assembled students were won over from the first. ‘Gooogle’, a poem described by O’Riordan as ‘the best thing in this book’ begins:

“A prayer then

for the men who sit

pale as geishas,

by the glow of obsolete

computers”

O’Riordan described his subject matter here as the ‘new and subtle forms of melancholy afforded by the information age’: finally, a poet who knows what it is to Facebook stalk one’s exes.

The Shirley Society continue their brilliant line-up for this term with Lavinia Greenlaw, winner of the 1997 Forward Poetry Prize – whose collection The Casual Perfect was one of my top ten of 2011 –on the 29th February.