Pádraig O'Tuama

I was going to ask about childhood and poetry.

Do you have distinct memories of particular poets or writing poetry yourself as a child?

The quarters have just continued.

Yeah, right.

I'm going to give you a quarter for every poem you recite by memory tonight.

Lovely.

Well, we're going to take a hop, skip and a jump through your collections of works as you and I have a conversation tonight.

There's some themes that seem consistent throughout your work and then other themes that emerge.

And so, yeah, we'll take a little dip into each one.

In 2008, you published The Earth in the Attic.

And I wonder if you could read the Tea and Sage poem.

It's on page 28 here.

Thank you.

The Tea and Sage poem from The Earth in the Attic.

I am so interested in the capacity, even in that very first book of yours, to put family, love, history, war, taste, sensuality, too, all alongside each other in the elegance of those unfolding lines.

Was that something that you realised you had to do, or did you work at incorporating that into poems like this?

Sure.

I mean, I'm going to ask you to read another poem from that same book in a while, which is explicitly about time.

But this has time and lament and taste together.

I was so interested in the sensuality of that and in the commemoration of it.