Library assistant Karl Riordan, who grew up in the former mining communities of the South Yorkshire coalfield, is the author of the chapbook The Tattooist’s Chair (Smokestack 2017). For the last five years he and his Filipino wife have been forced to live thousands of miles apart because of UK immigration rules. Tinikling, his first full-length collection, is dedicated to his wife, and in solidarity with others who face a similar plight.

‘Tinikling’ is a traditional Philippine folk dance which originated during the Spanish colonial era. As shown in the cover image of Fernando Amorsolo’s The Tinikling Dance Painting, it involves two people beating, tapping and sliding bamboo poles on the ground and against each other in co-ordination with one or more dancers who step over and in between the poles. The dance was an imitation of how the tikling bird walks and jumps over branches, dodging traps set by farmers with its stilt-like legs. According to legend, the dance was also purported to be a form of punishment.

Riordan’s poems are fast-paced narratives that often take the form of character sketches. His subjects feature roadside cafes, sheep in McDonald’s at Ebbw Vale, the controlled demolition of a chimney stack, workmen’s banter on a building site, majorettes at a miners’ gala and Miriam crossing the Red Sea. Other subjects derive from the Philippines: mangos that are ready to drop, peeling pomelo “before asking the parents’ permission”, and a poem about the bust of Ferdinand Marcos, in which Riordan recounts its controversial construction which displaced indigenous Ibaloi residents, forcing them to sell their homes at knockdown prices and, years later, its destruction by dynamite in 2002.

Many of his poems contain small cameos or what I prefer to call pockets of information that are intriguing in themselves. Often we are never given the full story, just the bare bones, but it is enough to set the scene. In the memorably titled ‘Musculoskeletal Imaging’, for example, Riordan gives us this scene just a stone’s throw from Stirling: “Wallace’s Monument, denim flares, / my arm head-locked around my brother’s neck / tussling behind an unaware mother / posing for holiday snaps / long before their divorce …”  In the space of just five lines we are told the location, the time (defined in terms of the leading fashion), the action, the main characters and a life-changing event that happens at some point in the future. In ‘The Snog’ Riordan gives us another cameo. This time it is about a couple in love. The writing is well-crafted, not sentimental, just factual, but it also holds our interest: “He slips cold hands inside her coat, / like a teenager at the bus stop. / What’s happening in there? / She reaches for the clouds of his shoulders, / clung like a koala.”

There is much to admire in this collection with its references to historical and contemporary events at home and abroad. Riordan has an instinctive feel for strong end-lines which often yield additional information, giving each poem a further layer of meaning. I learnt many things during the course of reading it, including the derivation and meaning of the word ‘silodrome’ and the fact that a ‘rangale’ is yet another collective noun for a herd of deer. Recommended.

Karl Riordan, Tinikling, Smokestack, £7.99