Floods, Maurice Riordan's second collection, continues the preoccupation with instability and flux voiced in his earlier A Word from the Loki, a Poetry Book Society Choice. These poems recall the humanist tradition of poetry as a means for imparting knowledge about the observable world; but they also mix ancient wisdom (signs and wonders) with the science of the quantum age. The old and new coexist - interrogating the book's epigraph that 'time is what keeps everything from happening at once' - and this informs the more personal poems: childhood memories of Ireland and poems of irretrievable loss tempered with the intimation that time's arrow is not, perhaps, relentlessly linear.