Leeanne Quinn
- Ireland -
Leeanne Quinn’s debut collection of poetry, Before You (2012), was highly commended in the Forward Prize for Poetry 2013. Her second collection, Some Lives (2020), was noted as a Book of the Year by The Irish Times and The Irish Independent. With Joseph Woods, she co-edited Romance Options: Love Poems for Today (2022) and, most recently, edited Beginnings Over and Over: Four New Poets from Ireland (2025). Her poems have been widely anthologised, appearing in The Forward Book of Poetry 2013, Windharp: Poems of Ireland Since 1916, Hold Open the Door: A Commemorative Anthology from The Ireland Chair of Poetry, and Queering The Green: Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry. She holds a PhD in American Literature from Trinity College Dublin, and has taught contemporary poetry at LMU Munich, Germany, given guest lectures on poetry at the Highlanes Gallery (Drogheda), the University of Dortmund, the University of Stuttgart, and at the Trieste Joyce School. She completed a residency at the Heinrich Böll Cottage on Achill Island in 2018, and has been awarded a further residency there for September 2025. Originally from Monasterboice, Co. Louth, she has lived in Germany, Austria, and is now based in Limerick, Ireland.
ON LEEANNE QUINN, IRELAND
‘ . . . On the eve of St. John there were several
monstrous bone fires. Being a complete stranger
I couldn’t stand the stench. It was better to think
of apples lying full in the thick grass, red moons
circling red moons, apples circling apples.’
Sometimes a poet finds their way through complex transmissions from one generation to the next, sometimes a poet finds that they speak, feel, and hear in a language that is not quite ‘languaged’ as a poetry reading public might expect. Leaenne Quinn is one such poet to note, read, and hear reading work that is particularly important in today’s increasingly beleaguered European context.
Irish, European, having lived in Germany and Austria for several years, her work appears at even the most cursory reading to gather in the stress signals, the prickle of anxiety that suggests not alone whole societies, but a way of being that is meditated and mediated by the poet.
How does one mediate the self in a world so fractured that it lies beneath the feet of the poet as millions of fragments that draw a quiet blood? How to live in this physical space that is—clearly, as she perceives it—non-physical, liminal, uncertain? The only certainties lie in knowing oneself to be a stranger in habit and being, in entering each space, whether we speak of cities, urban landscapes, the Irish coast, or the sometimes frightening and brutal customs of old Europe, and trying to bring the acceptance of uncertainty to bear on the past and the present.
The poet’s questions may be seen as responses to a sometimes elusive philosophical poetic as when she enquires
‘And what is it about fish
swimming under the thin scum of the wash
forming and reforming its pattern in the sun.
What is it that makes the derelict
emerge so easily from the dark mouth of the station,
from the bridge where the trains run
in concurrent sentences from light to dark.’
Loss and memory pervade some of this work, sibling complexities, even death. When the poet considers the sea at Mornington, on Ireland’s east coast, there is doubt about presence. The sand is too hard to walk on. Bathers depart the water, turn their backs on a wreck. The speaker dives and finds that the sea is ‘empty’. And later, she returns to swim out, ‘just far enough/to frighten myself.’
She focuses also on people who changed how we think and whose perception of our time on the physical planet altered so much, turning to Gertrude Stein, May Ray, Elizabeth Bishop, where one feels she finds solace. Through Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, one finds Quinn’s own lines have instinctively linked to a way of being that attempts to include the vastness of human unknowing, the vastness of mortality.
A nagging sense of mortality underpins the writing. Everything, she suggests in her poem ‘On a Flat Earth’, even if accounted for, is quite unaccountable. How, she asks can we ever know Earth’s true position in the universe, or the moon’s phases, or the dip sector? These and other questions present themselves in a test of science that is epistemological, sometimes metaphysical and often hermeneutical. Quinn is a tester of knowledge with observations both literary and scientific, where even the realm of the interpersonal undergoes similar scrutiny. In her poem ‘Rings’, she draws together several apparently fragmentary elements, among them her perceived failure to recognise certain things about her ‘former self’. But in a series of lyrical images, something healing is restored from beyond the world of alienation, and
‘ . . . [I] have brought you gifts
from the sea—fine shells to shape into hearts
or bones, rough sale carried on my skin,
rings of sand to wear as amulets.
Look how far I have travelled to see you,
how sand falls like gold from my sleeves.’
Travel, the journey, the discovery, and sometimes, an attempt to wrest what is discovered from historical horror feature in Quinn’s oeuvre, as in the uncollected poem ‘The Bullring’. We witness cruelty, the what used to be described by locals, a practice known as . . . involving (it is suggested) bulls with snouts pinned down for dogs to savage. It is a powerful image that begs the question of who and what is pinned down today. But the poet reminds the reader about demolition, rebuilding, and dual carriageways, presumably to obliterate the past, the new articles of faith we use to assuage collective guilt. As if such pasts have ever disappeared? As if they are not right now vivid and shrieking as Ukrainian, Russian, Korean men undergo agonies of savagery yet to be told? But, the poet tells us ‘Everyone laughed./ Nowadays, nowadays, nowadays.’
Leeanne Quinn’s ‘nowadays’ is not a site for forgiveness. If anything, she condemns it and us for our failure to recognise that living in the dimension we call ‘the present’ explains little, offers no meaning. Her magnificent extended poem ‘Some Lives’ reflects on ‘falling bodies’, on the death camp Sobibór, the culling of pigeons, and the fear expressed by Marina Tsvetaeva and similarly by Mandelstam of the effect of their own verses. The danger of articulation is clear as she disinters Mandelstam’s ominous words ‘Don’t talk about them . . . or it may all happen.’ This extended meditation is framed at both ends by the couplet
‘And though I’m colder than I’ve ever been,
nobody mentions the weather.’
Paradoxically, Leeanne Quinn’s poetry leaves the reader with a sense of courage. One must have, or at least acquire courage to face the challenges of living within many intersecting dimensions of experience, some of them lingering and historical, others phenomenological, and yet others the simple quotidian matter of getting by. Of living with a loved one. Of moving through cities. Of being human although everything in our social and political experience now attempts to undermine that question.
Leeanne Quinn. Read her
Poetry
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/ Before You
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/ Storms
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/ Water
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/ Accidents
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/ Precedence
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/ On a Flat Earth
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/ Not At All Like The Sea
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/ Could Be
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/ Other Worlds
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/ And Now
