Lordan is the poetic voice that Ireland needs and he arrives exactly upon his hour. William Wall

Invitation to A Sacrifice demands to be read and heard in the way that Lordan's great precursors (including Burroughs and Bolaño) command our attention. No other Irish poet writing today has a clearer sense of the rottenness of the contemporary Irish state, or the courage to critique it in the way Lordan does in this collection, 'boiling with love and the apocalypse'. Ignore and stay ignorant.  Philip Coleman

Dave Lordan's poetic voice bristles with humour, outrage, tenderness and terror.  From its epic articulation of the confusion and helplessness of economic meltdown, to its wry, intense evocations of people, places and circumstances, Invitation To A Sacrifice is a dynamic and inventive poetic experience, reflecting Dave’s ability as a live performer.  Conor Shields, New Belfast Arts

Dave Lordan was born in Derby, England, in 1975, and grew up in Clonakilty in West Cork. In 2004 he was awarded an Arts Council bursary and in 2005 he won the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry. His collections are The Boy in The Ring (Cliffs of Moher, Salmon Poetry, 2007), which won the Strong Award for best first collection by an Irish writer and was shortlisted for the Irish Times poetry prize; and Invitation to a Sacrifice (Salmon Poetry, 2010). Eigse Riada theatre company produced his first play, Jo Bangles, at the Mill Theatre, Dundrum in 2010. He has lived in Holland, Greece and Italy, and now resides in Greystones, Co Wicklow. He can be contacted at dlordan@hotmail.com.

Stuffed Toddler

In the catacombs in Palermo
there is a stuffed toddler,
standing up.

You see her as you round a corner,
at the far end of a new corridor,
facing you from the next turn.

Momentarily she seems to glow with life,
to be about to leap out from the wall and run
towards you.

Playfully.
Like a real live infant.
But who would bring a real live infant down here?
Down here to run the gauntlet
of the upright, flaking dead.

Closer in, you see that she really is
very well preserved.
In a dress. Ribbons.
As if a bridesmaid. Or on a visit
to a distant relative
who must be impressed.

She looks, you think,
like an ideal child.
A made-to-order child.
A child designed by advertisers.
Almost a mannequin.
Blemish free, perfectly symmetrical.

You guess, and the guide affirms,
that it is the mother, the father,
the grown-up sisters and brothers, and so on,
who line the gallery fanning out on either side of her.

Obviously, they were a rich family,
powerful, rapacious, cruel. Tender beyond reason
to their little girl. Showering her with gifts.
Protecting her from all harm.
Daring anyone to so much as look at her
with bad intent.
   
They must have visited her very often.
Perhaps even every day.
One of them,
at least.



The Methods of The Enlightenment

I was at high tea with a certain northern plumber, and a certain northern plumber’s life coach and lover, who also does a little bit of plumbing. We were discussing our rivals in the local plumbing trade. How we could crush them. Various proposals were put forward  by the life coach, who had convened the high tea, and was always eager to act as our mouthpiece.
    By the time the eight-cup pot had run dry we had come round to settling on proposal number 4.
    Since I am our plumbing circle’s archivist, I minuted our decision in an invisible ink of our own design. On our very own invisible paper.
    Recently, we have had approaches of interest in our archive from the British Plumber’s Library in Harlsden centre for contemporary plumbing.
    I was glad it was proposal number 4 that had won out. The other proposals were run of the mill, the usual combinations of letter-writing campaigns, anonymous e-mails and web-postings, free-for-all rumour spreading, targeted slanders, and clandestine meetings with county councillors and arts’ colonels.
    Proposal No 4 went like this: Invite our rivals around to our apartment to join the editorial board of a new plumbing journal of international significance, with guaranteed gold-standard funding from abroad. The beckoning of conferences galore. Give them each an alluringly fancy title as a kind of peace offering to smooth over previous attempts on their life and reputation.  Say ‘International Editor’, or ‘ New Plumbing Bongo-Bongo Man’ or ‘Plumbetry Geronimo’. As an added bait, beg them to bring along their latest work, as much as they can fit into their satchels, for sharing and complimentary appraisal.
    When they arrive, compliment them hugely on how beautiful they are in their sarongs and their various tweeds and handcrafted woollens, how distinguished looking are their sidelocks, how eyecatching is the twinkle of their chandelearings.
    Separate them from their writings by telling them we are going to put the type-sheets in an anonymous pile and draw lots on the reading order, so as to be strictly democratic and equal opportunities. Put the writings safely away in the utility room.
    Serve the writers canapes, and Lambrusco laced with rohypnol and valium. Tell them the vegetarian guinea pig is in the oven. Put on some hopeful ethnic music. Dance with them. Tell all of them separately that they are fabulous dancers. When, one by one, they begin to complain of exhaustion, sit them down sympathetically around a heavy fire.  
     As soon as they are all seated and their eyes have started to droop, beat them to death with fire extinguishers.  
    Afterwards, whenever we have exhausted all of our other enthusiasms and peccadillos, divide their unstained papers among ourselves, using the Methods of The Enlightenment.

Radio Review:  Arena, RTE Radio 1, 13th August 2010. Review by Colm Keegan, in conversation with Sean Rocks.  Listen here>>



Review:  Burning the Tiger's vanities, a review by Eamon Grennan, The Irish Times, Saturday 7th August 2010

Dave Lordan’s new collection bristles with satiric energy and a richly varied vocabulary of attack that, at its best, is morally pointed and comically exuberant, converting anger into a performative language of wide cultural reference and rhythmic power. Like any conscientious objector, Lordan’s contrarian stance questions the culture (Irish as well as global) he lives in, implicating himself by his use of pronouns (“our”, “us”, “we”) in the general rot. I’m startled, then satisfied, by the speed, scatological diction and kaleidoscopic image-making of a poem such as Funeral City Passeggiata . Pieces such as Invisible Horses or Spite Specific reveal, too, the positive emotional side reinforcing Lordan’s satire. There’s a remarkable energy at work here, impatient of shibboleths and sacred cows, while indifferent to conventional lyric effect.

Let go on, losing focus, some of Lordan’s pieces become just stand-up routines: the poem on automatic, not outliving its own jokey cleverness. At times, too, the poems degenerate into mere lists of peeves or hates. Another drawback of the collection is that it’s over-packed with too many poems. A sharper editorial and/or authorial eye would have trimmed the whole thing down (omitting, for example, the section of prose pieces, which simply cloud the general effect). At times, too, it’s hard to determine what exactly the enemy is – a sharper sense of the sniper rather than the blunderbuss nature of good satire would serve him well.

The long final poem, however, A Resurrection in Charlesland, is a bravura showpiece, working brilliantly on the page, as it must in performance. In it, Lordan breathlessly turns his head-on rant against our late but not lamented Celtic Tiger into powerful polemic, letting the rush of linguistic mayhem (Swiftian and Joycean riffs recur) be the proper metaphor for an anarchic state of things that’s mostly (by conspiracy and public collusion) hidden from sight, For all its differences of register and verbal manners, this poem might claim a place beside the poems of Kavanagh’s satiric period and Kinsella’s Nightwalker . Like them, it is an act of creative resistance to a suspect status quo, a resistance which Lordan correctly sees as part of poetry’s business.

New collections (for each their third) by three Irish poets, each with its own voice, its own way of wrestling with the language, its own decisive view of the world. One of my pleasures in reading them was the sense each one gave of the ways in which poetry can engage immediately or indirectly with public facts, as well as with the private forces (of feeling, intelligence, talent, sense of form, love of language, and so on) which determine its expression. Each volume, so, is political in one way or another, embodying (as each poet struggles privately with the language) some decisive attitude to larger and smaller aspects of Irish life as it is right now, and as it has been in our recent past. Between them they suggest the instructive, positively agitating intersection between poetry and its cultural contexts.

(also reviewed: Frightening New Furniture by Kevin Higgins)


Review: After the Revolution by Kevin Higgins, The Galway Advertiser, August 05, 2010.

In Invitation To A Sacrifice Dave Lordan knocks things over, usually things which deserve to be brought low. ‘Bullies’ is about hearing that someone who had bullied him at school had recently committed suicide. He responds as most would, but few would admit:

“I let out a screech of delight. I was alone in my bedroom/and no-one was listening. Save him, I’d like to imagine.”

In ‘Spite Specific’ he meets a nun at an art exhibition. They end up talking about the abuse scandals and it does not end well. Lordan meets the brutality meted out to himself and others with an equal and opposite poetic brutality. The fact that this book exists and that Lordan’s previous collection won prizes is proof of how successful the Irish poetry revolution has been.


Review: The Munster Express.  Review by Liam Murphy. Published on Friday, August 6th, 2010

Dave Lordan, who read at the Sean Dunne Writers Festival a few years ago to exciting acclaim has a new collection of poetry out with Salmon Poetry – Invitation to a Sacrifice.

He is a blast of passion and good old socialist values and his work rips along part rant part chant as he knows well where to lay the blame as his opening section Surviving The Recession that includes the title poem tells so well. Irish poetry might not be ready for the prose style of Lordan as he invokes the Patron Saint of FÁS to share the pain – hurt as many people as you can.

Despite the rocking and a rolling, the anger and the blaming there is a bleak core in the title poem – that if you could save the world – if you could save someone, what would you physically do with that person?

You have to read a poem like Funeral City Passeggiata out loud to experience the rush of words of political impresarios, pestilential pumpkin pie, in a world that "Jerry Lee Lewis never set fire to anything here/ neither did the sixties..."

A poem such as Bullies, touches familiar Irish ground that tells us - "We're silent about past crimes because violence works." And if you think Ride On is the greatest song (Jimmy McCarthy wrote it) then you have to read the whirlwind of Lordan's Invisible Heroes.

The ills of a nation and the recession are the stuff and stuffing of this book and a powerful poem like Sewage begins with - "It is the year of the tightening belt and takes you through a place "neck deep in shit".

A piece called "Somebody's Got To Do Something" is another blast of words, a searing blow torch to poetry and society.

If it's cynicism or sarcasm that you want then turn to the Plumbing Council which could be about the Arts Council but it is the final long poem A Resurrection in Charlesland that will rip into you and carry you along on a torrent of words as Lordan lashes out at headshops, joblessness - "Force feeding ourselves Dan Brown, valium, parox, Gerry Ryan and Angelology."

Lordan promises us that "Our grandchildren's days will be worse than our nightmares could dream of" as he rants and chants - "Tomorrow Stinks."



Radio Review:  Arena, RTE Radio 1, 13th August 2010. Review by Colm Keegan, in conversation with Sean Rocks.  Listen here>>



Review: Socialist Worker Online (UK)

This poetry collection tackles the dominant rhetoric of sacrifice in an Ireland facing recession.

It documents the barbarism that subjugation to the market brings.

The poems rage against the institutions of the state with emotion, satire and humour. They are also something of a call to arms.

The tone moves between plaintive and howling while the language is clear and invigorating.

Cork’s answer to Adrian Mitchell deserves a wider audience outside of Ireland.