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O'o'a'a' Bird

Justin Quinn

Cover Picture of O'o'a'a' Bird
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
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  • Hold the lamp-flex hard,
    Its cool fluent against your palm.
    Nothing will seem to happen. Then think: inside, onward
    Coursing to the strange-branched metal plant,
    Electrons race until they come
    To the end, and explode constantly in pure event.
    Although there is space on a sixpence to contain, intricately embossed, an abridged version of everything, detail is always welcome.' O'o'a'a'Bird, Justin Quinn's first book, starts with seriously playful poems which approach his instructively disparate geographies and languages, Irish and Czech. He finds in and between them meanings which are lyrical, political and civic. Love is never far away. His book ends with an ambitious sequence of twenty four-stanza poems.

    Justin Quinn's work is European in orientation. Anyone familiar with the streets of Dublin or of Prague will recognise a walked topography in the poems which rises out of a Baroque imagination with a hunger for Doric simplicities. The Czech and the Irish Republics reflect light on one another. Some of the poems consider the issue of nationalism and nationhood in a Europe where the smaller units seek advantage and definition at the same time, and where different histories collide.
    Justin Quinn was born in Dublin in 1968 and now lives in Prague, where he works at the Charles University. He was a founding editor of the Irish poetry magazine Metre and has published three collections of poetry. In 2005, he published a study of 20th-century American poetry and in 2008 ... read more
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