The 'O'o'a'a' Bird

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.