Poet Leeanne Quinn joins Words That Burn to discuss her third collection, Landscape with Question, published by Carcanet Press.
Written between Drogheda and Vienna, the collection holds two conversations at once: one with the Irish modernist painter Nano Reid, whose family bar on James' Street was later run by Quinn's parents, and one with Ingeborg Bachmann's novel Malina. Quinn explains why the \"landscape with\" poems move away from the representational towards questions of time and place, and why she took the three birth years Reid gave over her lifetime as the spine for the book's three sections.
We talk about writing without a plan and finding the loops and repetitions only after the book is finished, about reading Reid's matter-of-fact titles against her abstraction, and about the eighteenth and nineteenth century visitor reports on Drogheda that Quinn cuts into her lines as springboards. We also discuss the speaker's resistance to being located, the surveillance running under the collection, and the elegy that surfaces in \"Landscape with Crows\", which adapts a line from H.D.'s Tribute to Freud.
Leeanne reads two poems: \"First Part of the Night\" and the title poem, \"Landscape with Question\".
Leeanne Quinn is from Drogheda, County Louth, and holds a doctorate in American literature from Trinity College Dublin. Her first collection, Before You, was highly commended in the Forward Prize. Her second, Some Lives, was a book of the year for both The Irish Times and The Irish Independent. She has edited two anthologies for Dedalus Press.
Landscape with Question is out now from Carcanet Press. Links to Leeanne's work are below.
If you enjoy the episode, please leave a review wherever you listen.
Photo credit for the thumbnail Bríd O'Donovan
Follow the Podcast On Instagram
","author_name":"Benjamin Collopy"}