Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Not every book has an epigraph in untranslated Czech, but Justin Quinn, born and educated in Dublin, now works at Charles University, Prague.

     In 1968 his parents were moving while he was still in his mother’s womb, “Oblivious to the fact that soon/ I will be made to move as well.” Uprooted, you could say:

At sixty miles an hour
The world’s being folded back
Into a suitcase. Where
Oh where will I unpack?

     He rhymes consistently, makes a villanelle, clearly thinks of poems as contraptions. He celebrates love, in exotic domesticity too: even a household ‘element’ opens cosmic prospects:

In central Europe I placed a kettle on a hob
And waited in the kitchen. And from its
                                              watery depths
From deep down at the element itself, the
                                                            sound
Of North Atlantic surf came crashing
                                                storming out.

     He likes these defamiliarizing angles. He looks through the spyhole on his door and sees the corridor defamiliarized - but also his wife now, imagined straphanging home on the Metro - to be all the more valuable when ‘real again’. But the ‘reality’ of home too is an all-too thin appearance. Insomnia exposes lying:

We lie because
I sleep, you don’t.
Statements of love,
We two are one...

     The poems back in Ireland are awakenings to unfamiliarity, like coming out of the cinema. The self is unfamiliar:

...No up, no down, no right nor left.
     The hand that scribbles this,
     The shadow spread across this page,
     Are whose?

Is everything that is the case really the case?