Before You

Loss and memory. The poems of the first section of Irish poet Leeanne Quinn's debut collection explore the intimacies of a sibling relationship, and revisit it from a distance travelled since, where new experience is "the earth's irreproachable / response to your absence". Other poems intersperse this main narrative, inspired by a variety of subjects, from Gertrude Stein to the Drogheda-born artist Nano Reid, natural disasters to the complex territory of broken relationships. Pain is evoked, sensed never far from the surface, but the telling remains oblique, the particulars refusing a simple summary or conclusion. Life goes on, in what one of the poems in the second section calls "this awful business of living", a variant on a phrase by Elizabeth Bishop whose letters, in counterpoint to the book's first section, prompt and provide an external departure point and reference.