Pádraig Ó Tuama

speaker

1,142 appearances 8 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 18 Sep

Pádraig Ó Tuama’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.

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Poetry Unbound · Poetry Unbound in Conversation — Richard Scott · 24 Jul 2026 podcast

In so much of the speaker of this collection, in so many of the ways that we're brought into the speaker's voice, we find somebody who has invasive thoughts about this character.

You know, almost every day for some moments I think about him and then it's a reference to all us boys who've been ruined by men and I survived by being still.

All of these kinds of lines which are an assault on attention and

And what you're proposing, it seems to me, is that what some people might consider to be escapism, you know, going to an art gallery is actually a tool of survival and is a tool of the imagination that hasn't been colonized and where war hasn't been enacted on an aspect of the imagination.

Do you think that too much focus on trying to say, describe the thing as it is, can take away from the possibly healing aspects of where the imagination wishes to go?

I've read this book in full three times now.

And I realized that at the end of reading it, that I have images in my mind as to what the images that you're looking at are, the still lifes.

But in my mind, they're all like intensely colored.

Is that true?

This is me just guessing.

I mean, are any of them quite sparse in terms of their coloration?

It comes across.

Could you read the opening poem, Still Life with Roses?

I studied theology, Richard, and in lots of religious traditions that have a tradition of iconography, whether that's of a statue or a painting or of a calligraphy, the idea is that you're looking at that image.

But in the religious imagination, something's looking back and you're being made as you're viewing the art that's been made by an artist.

And it occurs to me that there's something akin to a deep yearning that occurs in this speaker's voice in this poem.

So let me in where everything is newborn and crystalline, paused and protected into that other world.

That feels something like a prayer.

I'm not interested in the theological idea of that, but I'm really interested in the absolute declaration of a deep desire in this opening poem.

So let me in.

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