Justin Quinn is an Irish poet and critic, born in Dublin in 1968. He received a doctorate from Trinity College, Dublin, where his contemporaries included poets Caitriona O’Reilly and Sinead Morrissey, and now lives with his wife and sons in Prague. He is a lecturer at Charles University.

He has published four poetry collections: The ‘O’o’a’a’ Bird (1995), Privacy (1999), Fuselage

(2002) and Waves & Trees

(2006). The ‘O’o’a’a’ Bird was nominated for the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection.

He was a founder editor of the poetry journal Metre and has published two critical studies, Gathered Beneath the Storm: Wallace Stevens, Nature and Community, and American Errancy: Empire, Sublimity and Modern Poetry. He has also translated extensively from Czech, in particular the work of Petr Borkovec, and written non-fiction prose on life in the Czech Republic for the Dublin Review.

Quinn’s work shows the influence of American writers such as, principally, Wallace Stevens, but also Anthony Hecht and James Merrill. It is characterized by a sensual lushness informed by an awareness of the violence of history, as inflected by the author’s experiences of living in the Czech Republic. In its mix of formalist sophistication and openness to experiment Quinn’s work confounds perceptions of Irish poetry as rigidly dichotomized between formal conservatism and 1930s-derived innovation, a distinctiveness confirmed by the editorial decision to award him the single largest share of the 2004 Bloodaxe anthology The New Irish Poets.

The snow turns down the sound on everything.
Not even trams can get their thunder through.
The kids going wild with sleds seem further off,
a mile more distant, weakly echoing.
It makes things fresh. It might even renew
the rusting factories of Karlín and Žižkov.
Across a clearing in the park, two men
go back and forth in patterns of attack,
old sequences of murderous violence—
one body snapping shut the moment when
it strikes, the other opening quickly back.
They work in silence, inside the larger silence.
After an hour or so the fighting ends
and they shake hands like colleagues or old friends.