Poet Stephen de Búrca joins me on Words That Burn to talk through his debut collection Atlantic Fret, published by The Gallery Press; a book where sea mist and anxiety share a single word, and where the Atlantic carries both personal grief and the weight of the climate crisis.

Stephen explains how a few lines from Derek Mahon's The Sea in Winter gave him the title, and how a book he never intended to write about his father; a marine biologist who died when Stephen was a teenager, became unavoidable once he started writing about the sea.

We talk about erosion as a double image: coastlines and memory both wearing away, and memory used not as autobiography but as a search for emotional truth.

The conversation covers the pleasure of withholding, why the speaker in "Seaspray" never has to finish the gesture, and how much a line can bear before it breaks.

Stephen walks us through Gerard Manley Hopkins' curtal sonnet, the shrunken eleven-line form Hopkins devised because he thought English couldn't carry a full fourteen, and why a form he theorised passionately about only produced three poems of his own.

We also discuss "Scope and Dredge," built from radio programmes Stephen's father made for Connemara Community Radio about oyster fishing in Galway Bay, and the pressure of shaping a poem out of a parent's own recorded work. And we finish with the fourth section of the book, where Stephen translates the Icelandic modernist Jón úr Vör's Þorpið (The Village) word by word, without speaking Icelandic - a slow process that turned into the negative image of everything else in the collection.

In this episode we cover:

• Writing elegy without setting out to write it
• Memory, erosion and the climate crisis in Irish eco-poetry
• Ambiguity, inference and the value of the unknown
• Writing at night, badgers and nocturnal animals
• Reading: "At the River Mouth"; and playing loose with terza rima
• Hopkins, Jenny Johnson and the curtal sonnet
• Reading: "Reading About Rod Stewart's Atlantic Crossing"
• Inheritance, prayer and poems that speak to each other across a book
• Translating Jón úr Vör from Icelandic without the language

Stephen de Búrca is a writer from Galway. He completed his PhD at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University Belfast, and an MFA from the University of Florida. He received the Ireland Chair of Poetry Travel Award and the inaugural Poetry Ireland Gerald Dawe Poetry Bursary in 2026. Stephen’s work has featured in Poetry Ireland Review, PN Review, The Stinging Fly, Banshee, Propel Magazine, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection, Atlantic Fret, was published by The Gallery Press and is out now.

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Keywords: Stephen de Búrca, Atlantic Fret, The Gallery Press, Irish poetry podcast, Galway poet, Derek Mahon, Gerard Manley Hopkins, curtal sonnet, Jón úr Vör, Icelandic poetry translation, eco-poetry, elegy, poetry interview, Words That Burn

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Poet Leeanne Quinn joins Words That Burn to discuss her third collection, Landscape with Question, published by Carcanet Press.

Written between Drogheda and Vienna, the collection holds two conversations at once: one with the Irish modernist painter Nano Reid, whose family bar on James' Street was later run by Quinn's parents, and one with Ingeborg Bachmann's novel Malina. Quinn explains why the "landscape with" poems move away from the representational towards questions of time and place, and why she took the three birth years Reid gave over her lifetime as the spine for the book's three sections.

We talk about writing without a plan and finding the loops and repetitions only after the book is finished, about reading Reid's matter-of-fact titles against her abstraction, and about the eighteenth and nineteenth century visitor reports on Drogheda that Quinn cuts into her lines as springboards. We also discuss the speaker's resistance to being located, the surveillance running under the collection, and the elegy that surfaces in "Landscape with Crows", which adapts a line from H.D.'s Tribute to Freud.

Leeanne reads two poems: "First Part of the Night" and the title poem, "Landscape with Question".

Leeanne Quinn is from Drogheda, County Louth, and holds a doctorate in American literature from Trinity College Dublin. Her first collection, Before You, was highly commended in the Forward Prize. Her second, Some Lives, was a book of the year for both The Irish Times and The Irish Independent. She has edited two anthologies for Dedalus Press.

Landscape with Question is out now from Carcanet Press. Links to Leeanne's work are below.

If you enjoy the episode, please leave a review wherever you listen.

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Photo credit for the thumbnail Bríd O'Donovan

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Welcome back to Words That Burn, the poetry podcast taking a closer look at poetry. In this episode, host Benjamin Collopy offers a close reading of Kaveh Akbar's "Famous Americans and Why They Were Wrong", from his 2021 collection Pilgrim Bell.

The poem runs to seven couplets and moves from a ribbon tied around an oak tree to a wish that somebody forgets you today. Benjamin situates Akbar as a poet formed by prayer and by place, tracing the poet's biography from a boy reciting Arabic he could not translate to a writer preoccupied with what empire does to language.

In This Episode, I Explore:

• The Ribbon and the Hostage Crisis: Why the opening image reads so strangely to a non American audience, and how the yellow ribbon curdled from a welcome into a warning after 1979. We follow the poem discussion through the oak's roots sinking into the dirt and the heart that sinks alongside them, and ask what exactly is seeping into whom.
• Akbar's Ghazal: A look at the form, its couplets, its refrains, and the strict rules Akbar declines to follow. The ghazal is famous for what Agha Shahid Ali called its formal disunity, and that disunity turns out to be the literary technique doing the heaviest lifting here. We break down how enjambment carries meaning across couplets that seem unrelated on the page, one of several literary devices worth slowing down for.
• Data at the Centre of a Heart: The sinking library, the architect who forgot the weight of the books, and Akbar's argument that empire uses abstraction to cudgel us into idleness. We look at what the word "data" is doing in a poem that also treats untranslated prayer as a kind of data, and why only one of those is sacred.
• The Mercy of Being Forgotten: Why a poem about erasure ends by wishing for it. Visibility inside an empire is rarely a gift, and Akbar's closing hope is offered in the grammar of prayer, which is to say with no guarantee anyone is listening.

Accessible enough for poetry for beginners and no prior reading required. As always, this poetry interpretation belongs to Benjamin and is very much up for debate. Full script with citations and references on Substack, linked below.

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The Music In This Week's Episode:

'Hydra' by Huda - released under CC-BY 4.0.

Time Stamps:

00:00 Poetry Reading

00:51 Poetry as Prayer

01:43 Kaveh Akbar's Background

03:39 The Iranian Hostage Crisis

05:04 Iranian Identity in America

06:43 Understanding the Title

08:28 Ribbons and Patriotic Symbols

09:50 The Ghazal Form

13:00 Weaponisation of Language

15:25 Data and Dehumanisation

18:52 The Final Couplet

20:58 Empire and Prayer

21:39 Closing Thoughts

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