Steve Denehan

Steve Denahan is an award-winning poet who lives in rural County Kildare with his wife Eimear and his teenage daughter Robin.

I met Steve last year when his book of poetry A Quarter Dead and Half Alive was published.

We promised to continue our conversation, so I went down to Steve's house for a chat.

We got to talk about how Steve left a good job in IT to write poetry.

We also spoke about his adoption, his dad's dementia, and Steve's struggle to understand people and life.

There's an explanation of ekphrastic poetry in there as well, but don't let that scare you.

It's a bit la-di-da for Steve as well.

I do hope you enjoy our chat.

Thanks so much for having us in your home.

No, thanks for coming.

We're here in Allum Wood with Steve Dennehan.

poet.

What sort of poet are you?

Simple.

Yeah, I keep it simple.

Somebody said confessional.

I don't know if that's the case, because sometimes I get a little story and I write about these fictional people, I suppose, for the most part, maybe confessional.

But I keep things very simple because my hope is that I don't want any sort of barrier between me and the reader.

So I find if I'm reading these snazzy poems,

and I have to keep interrupting myself to go and look in a dictionary, it breaks the whole momentum of the poem and the spell is gone and everything.