Justin Quinn

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Commentary
Colin Graham, ‘Antidote to an allergy to poetry’, review of Justin Quinn, Fuselage (Gallery), in The Irish Times (8 Jan. 2003), Weekend [with another by Dennis O’Driscoll]: ‘[...] Fuselage is one of the most exciting and innovative collections of Irish poetry in recent years. Its voice is intellectual and caring. It is written with ingenuity and integrity. The collection ends with a poem on the birth of a son, and it is probably the bravest of all in the collection, since it does not sentimentally shy away from the world made so vividly suffocating in the rest of the book. As the world seems to tighten around the child a video recorder clicks on, “is focused and the footage runs and runs”. With the child’s life already, entering the electronic mediation which pervades Fuselage, the collection ends poised between the father’s “stockstill” wonder at his child and the child’s mother “emptied on the bed”. It’s a movingly honest, half-full, half-empty, image to end a collection of definitively contemporary and truly lasting poetry.’ (See full text, infra.)

Philip Coleman, review of Close Quarters [with collections by others], in The Irish Times (20 Aug. 2011), Weekend, p.11: ‘[...] Although his primal scene of instruction may have been a classroom in south Co Dublin, however, Quinn remains transfixed by and obsessed with non-Irish cultures and contexts. / This, indeed, is one of the chief values of his poetry, because his poetic engagements with Irish culture, unlike the interventions of his critical writing, often lack the kind of insight one finds in poems such as “Musílkova” or “The Months”, with its haunting images of “the rusting factories of Karlin and Zizkov” and “the delta as a mess of leaves / and feathers, scattered papers, thrums of nets”. In the sixth section of “The Months” we are told that “Dave mentioned on the phone how June had hit him / with memories of the Leaving Cert”, and this return to the realm of formal education, and the inability to escape it, is a recurring source of tension in Quinn’s work. In Seminar the speaker - a lecturer in American literature, like the author - loves “the way [his students] sit / and use their bodies to nuance what they say”, and he has to “lean forward to catch the drift of it”. In another poem, a father proudly carries his infant “daily to the crèche / along the path, our prince / or princess, full of beans”. However, one yearns for Quinn to write poems that might be less obedient to their formal routes and ways of saying, for him to take a detour along the way signalled in poems such as First Spring Days, for example, or closer towards the true emotional centre of Close Quarters, which is to be found in poems such as Couple and Divorce. Quinn is an exacting formalist, and there are times, in A Shrike, say, or Elegy, when his lyrics almost soar, but the burden of the schoolbag tends at times to weigh him down.’

Ailbhe Darcy, ‘A Tiny Space of Little Importance’, review of Mount Merrion, in Dublin Review of Books, 47 (16 Dec. 2013): ‘Justin Quinn’s debut novel opens in the shiny new Galway Regional Hospital of the 1950s,[...] As the book opens, it is not clear whether either the hospital or the Irish Republic will thrive, or whether each will be left to “rust like an impressive wreck on the wild rocks of the western coast”. Quinn’s novel tells the story of the next forty years, placing a man called Declan Boyle at its centre. Boyle, born into privilege, is a patient at the hospital for one brief lull before his life unfolds. He plans to spend that life in service to the idea of Ireland. He will conjure a whole town’s worth of jobs from nothing, yet he will leave the stage wreathed in shame at the book’s close. [...] Mount Merrion draws to a close at the height of the Celtic Tiger era. Mark Turpin is the tiger cub attempting to break his way into the Boyles’ sphere. His great fault, the novel implies, is that he expects success to happen for him easily and fast, in contrast with Declan Boyle’s brave risk-taking and long hard slog. Brash, sexist and dumb, the young cub bears traces of Blackrock’s satirical finest, Ross O’Carroll Kelly. Turpin is there to fill us in on all the gossipy details of the newly prosperous Dublin - the brand-names, bars and “burnished and botoxed women” - with a blithe ignorance of his own absurdity. He makes for entertaining reading; but I could not shake the sense that, inside the satire, there was a full-fledged human trying to get out. [...] I have a soft spot for Mark Turpin. But I also wonder why Quinn could not extend a fuller measure of depth, complexity and history to Turpin’s generation of would-be movers and shakers, such is his generosity to Boyle’s maligned generation.’ (- available online [accessed 15.12.2013].)

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Quotations
The Old Communists [poem]: ‘You meet them at mid-afternoon receptions / Where they have come from their small offices / In ministries. They smile and profess / An interest in the IMF and options … What they won’t mention: x years back the period / When in the role of high apparachiks / They suddenly found that three or so rough weeks / And their Socialist Republic had disappeared, // Much as when in a crowded train you find / Your wallet gone, the banknotes and IDs / Spirited away by murderers and thieves, / And other bastards of that kind.’ (Times Literary Supplement, 26 Oct. 2001, p.24.)

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“Linger, tag, let go”: ‘Linger, tag, and let go / And drift off through the children’s furniture, / While I do lighting. / Crowds on a loop, they flow / And gaze considering their futures / Spent with each beautifully designed bright thing. […].’ (The Irish Times [Weekend], 2 Nov. 2001, p.9.)

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