An Interview with Poet Leeanne Quinn

So this is an ambitious intertextual poetry collection that has two conversations happening with two very distinct influences.

One of them is a landscape artist from Ireland, Nano Reid, and the other is an Austrian novel from the 70s called Melina.

It is a fascinating look at the mutability of landscape and i was wondering if you could talk me through why you chose the title landscape with question

Yeah, I guess landscape of question, like throughout the book, there's a number of poems with the landscape with motif.

The book engages, like you say, with Nana Reid, who is an Irish modernist artist from my hometown, Drogheda.

But the landscape with motif, Poems aren't actually based on paintings.

The poems that kind of engage with paintings and take their title from reads paintings.

So the landscape with, I suppose, in some way subverts the motif or the trope of that kind of painting.

And those poems are move away from the representational to, I suppose, what I could call the metaphysical.

So the landscape of question, poems like Landscape with Single Line, poems like Landscape with Change of Tense, they're more engaged with metaphysical or philosophical questions of time and place.

The big question that runs through the collection is, Which I hope the reader will pick up on or I'm sure it becomes evident within the book is the question of time.

So that's really the reason for the title.

I didn't feel the need to say exactly what it was.

Because, like I say, I think it is evident, but I suppose they also didn't really want to shut it down completely.

The question is anything or could be anything that confounds you on an existential level or on the level of consciousness.

And time is one of those things for the speaker in the collection.

There is a constant questioning of time throughout the collection.

And I was fascinated that you manage to revisit that theme so often, but in such new ways.

There's looping time.

There are recurrent images across three distinct levels as you go through the collection.

What is the challenge as a poet in planning that kind of long-term recurring image or looping motif?

I suppose I would say that I'm not a very good planner.

When I first started the book, it was supposed to be a biography in verse of Nana Reid.

But I quickly discovered I didn't really want to write that type of book for whatever reason.

It just...