Mimesis By Michael Quinn and Joe Boske, Little Gull Publishing 2025

Mimesis is a collaboration between poet Michael Quinn and artist Joe Boske. Mimesis is Quinn’s debut poetry collection and features original drawings, paintings and a selection of photographs. It is published by Little Gull Publishing and was launched at Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop in Galway on Friday 24 October at 6.30.

 Many of the poems in this collection are inspired by Boskes’ drawings. ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is a good example of this ekphrastic style of writing, its title is taken from Boskes’ drawing of the same name. Playful and humorous. It contains the lines;

Her hips move like hula hoops
He looks like a bus just about to go over a cliff

When rattled she is like a cobra ready to pounce
He has shoulders like Mike Tyson

She has eyes like a fire in the briar
He has skin like leather that’s been out in all kinds of weather

Boske’s drawings are both realistic and often fantastical at the same time. In ‘An Bó Mór’ we have the unlikely vision of a Frisian cow on top of the Pol na Brón Dolmen in Co Clare. Boske’s attention to detail is evident throughout the collection.

The motif of the cherry blossom recurs through several of Michael Quinn’s poems.

she plays the violin on spring song to me’,
and ‘Mother Nature is sick from carbon cancer’

………………………………………. – Sakura, My Cherry Blossom

These lines reveal this beauty and fragility of the natural world.

This pairing of illness with the transience of the cherry blossom is echoed in ‘In Reims or Epernay’:

The cherry blossoms heaved today
And whispered sweet time away.
I am not where I should be.

The virus made a hames of today.
We’re not in Reims or Epernay.
 I am not where I should be.  

In this poem however, the illness is the poets’ own.

In ‘Sayonara Hanami’, the poet is possibly foreseeing his own death, or the death of a loved one in the vulnerability of the cherry blossom’s early bloom.

Macushla Sakura, eleven days early,
Your petals they tell me your life pulse is fading.
Macushla Sakura, I hear your faint breathing
As I sit here pleading for you to stay.

Many of Michael Quinn’s poem deal with the personal and collective trauma in the Irish psyche. In ‘From a Corker Field’, Michael Quinn writes about his ancestor Eileen Quinn, who was shot during the War of Independence.

From a Corker field,
where no white poppy ever grew,
Eileen Quinn was murdered,

In ‘Celebrate Immigrants’, Michael Quinn points to the genocide of the Great Famine that still resonates in our DNA.

While the empire feasted
our ancestors begged
for just a little piece of corn.

This is the collection of a poet attempting to find his voice by looking to the work of Beckett, Yeats and Joyce. The choice of title for the collection points to this, Mimesis, means to imitate. The poem, ‘A Time to Stay at Home’, for example, is inspired by the opening lines of Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities.

But this collection is more than just an imitation, it is a heartfelt attempt to capture the fragility of life and to celebrate all the small beauties and blessings it contains. It is also a reflection on time passing, how much time we each have, and the importance enjoying the time we have.

 – Barbara Dunne

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Barbara Dunne is a writer, poet and artist living in the West of Ireland. Her poetry appears in Crannóg, Drawn to the Light Press, New Word Order, HOWL and The Storms. She has received bursaries from Poetry Ireland, The Irish Writers Centre and the Munster Litreture Centre. She is currently working on her first collection of poetry. 

 

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Mimesis can be ordered through Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop https://charliebyrne.ie/product/mimesis-michael-quinn-paperback-9781739130657/