Tuesday, August 23, 2011

News at Eleven: This, indeed, is one of the chief values

of his [Justin Quinn's] poetry, because his poetic engagements with Irish culture, unlike the interventions of his critical writing, often lack the kind of insight one finds in poems such as Musílkova or The Months, with its haunting images of "the rusting factories of Karlin and Zizkov" and "the delta as a mess of leaves/and feathers, scattered papers, thrums of nets". In the sixth section of The Months we are told that "Dave mentioned on the phone how June had hit him/with memories of the Leaving Cert", and this return to the realm of formal education, and the inability to escape it, is a recurring source of tension in Quinn's work.

from The Irish Times: Laying down the burden of the schoolbag, and other endeavours

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