Irish poet and performer Oisín Breen’s second poetry collection, Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín, was released in 2023 by Downingfield Press and has been highly praised by World Literature Today, The Scotsman, and The Washington Independent Review of Books. The collection draws on the sagas of the goddess Étaín from Irish mythology, weaving together a brocade where the mythic past meets an experimentalist future. Breen describes his work as employing ‘a smattering of other languages’ alongside English, most notably his Irish native-tongue.
Born in Dublin, Breen has established himself as a prominent voice in the Irish avant-garde, with his work featured in more than a hundred literary journals, magazines, and anthologies across over two dozen countries. He is a poet at home in the so-called ‘world republic of letters’, connecting the local with the universal. His next book, The Kerygma, is due in September through Salmon Poetry.
In this interview, I spoke with Breen, currently in Edinburgh, about Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín, his creative process, his use of language, and the intersection of myth and modernity in his work.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Your second poetry collection, Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín, was re-released last year by the Melbourne-based Downingfield Press. Could you tell me about how you wrote the title poem?
Oisín Breen (OB): The title poem, ‘Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín’, owes its genesis to the moment the curtain fell at the committal of my oldest and dearest friend’s mother.
My friend was so strong throughout the day, and in the run-up, joking, sharing, helping, always there for all those who loved his mother—including many who knew the iterations of her long before my friend was a glint in her eye. She was wise, kind, deeply loving, spiritual, playful, cheeky, mischievous, and passionate. Yet when the curtain fell, well, I saw my friend shatter, briefly, into so many pieces; but it was the way he shattered that was astoundingly beautiful. The word that came immediately to mind was ‘Godstruck’.
I knew then that I had to write this physical reality, this metaphysical reality. It had the awe of a medieval painting. It was inspiring in the truest sense of the word. So, write it I did, in my own way, weaving together myth, narrative, and a long meditation on the way in which iterations of ourselves through time form a communal being that perennially negotiates its own status as an identity creature/function/process. And then juxtaposing that with the total awegrief at a funeral, at a death, when one is present to a whole human for the first time, as they cohere slowly into a single vanished point that then branches out again into so many new forms. The fact that she who had passed was not only a mother, or a friend, she was a lover, she was sexual, she was playful, she probably carried a million doubts, and a million seeds of friendships, some of which bloomed, and some that didn’t—it is all this that I worked to try and capture, to hew and to weave, and I do hope that, in some small measure, I did.
AMMD: How did this poetry collection come about?
OB: ‘Lilies’ determined the nature of the work it paired with, and thus the nature of the collection. Beyond ‘Lilies’, within this collection, there is also ‘Ana Rua’, the sonic piece, which took root long before I put pen to paper on the titular poem.
It’s an older piece, but one that always sang to me, and I wrote it to try and find the way in which a howl and deep love and heavy wanting all blend together through the notes of nostalgia that can linger in the way we use language. It seemed the perfect major companion to the title piece.
Of the four shorter pieces that accompany the two long-form pieces, each deals with a different aspect of family and life. The subjects range from the hardship of supporting and being in a family during the horror-years of my country’s occupation, in ‘Six Months Bought with Dirt’; to the trauma of child loss in ‘At Swim, Two Pair’; the birth (or in this case non-birth) of love in ‘A Chiaroscuro of Hunger’; and to birth and the power of nature against the growing mechanisation of society, in ‘Even Small Birds Can Render Planets Unto Ash’.
AMMD: Readers and reviewers of Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín have often referenced the Beat Generation and the Modernist movement, using terms like ‘Yeatsian’ and ‘Joycean’. In previous interviews, you’ve mentioned influences such as Eliot, Byron, Pound, and Coleridge. What do you think is the place of Lilies and your other poetry collections within the Irish literary tradition, particularly Irish avant-garde poetry?
OB:
- Literary red flag #2,321: any writer who says they are wholly original or truly ‘inspired’.
- Literary red flag #2,322: any writer who says they don’t read the greats, because it would dilute their vision.
These writers you’ve just mentioned are, truly, writers I adore. But whenever someone says Yeatsian, or Joycean, or, say, as they have done on other occasions, Elliot-like, or Poundian, it’s both wonderful praise, and slightly a sentence of doom, is it not?
Of course, I love the idea of being in such heady company, these are stunningly brilliant writers, some of the best there have ever been—though it’s clear you’re not being branded remotely as par with such praise, merely that there is a redolence. Though, naturally, why would I not want there to be a redolence discoverable in my work that brings to mind the great yew trees, the willows, or the alder?
I’d be fairly confident to say that my work dovetails, at least to a degree, with Joyce—I’m not making a comparison based on quality, of course, more in terms of my heavy emphasis on playing with language and style. And when it comes to the more pastoral leanings in some of my work, you can certainly trace hints of Yeats and Heaney—but again, I wouldn’t see my work as fitting within the tradition of Heaney, and while it might fit in well with some of the spirit of Yeats, stylistically, tonally, and politically, it’s rather a big step away.
Some of my work also leans into the sensual, melodramatic elements of the Gothic writing you’d find in Stoker, and I’ve always agreed with Wilde on the value in beauty in and of itself, and felt kinship, too, with both Beckett and O’Brien’s willingness to put the magic and the deep meaning of a piece above the purely denotative. Equally, I’ve found real simpatico rising inside me when lingering in the joy of the romance and tragedy you can find in, say, Sean O’Casey’s work, or the gorgeous stylised prose you get in Kevin Barry’s, or indeed Paul Lynch’s today, and I very much enjoy Lynch’s openness to long winding weaving sentences that add colour to colour to colour.
Does it fit with, say, the beautiful narrative voice—old and strong—of Patrick Kavanagh, or with the oral tradition I grew up with? A tradition heavy with memory, as I, a child, sat around on the floor, watching and listening to the adults telling our stories and singing our songs? I feel, perhaps the most kinship with that telling, that kenning and sharing, even if the work itself is of the avant, rather than the traditional.
Perhaps then, my kinship is with this moment, today, where, in the Irish literary tradition, the Irish musical tradition, and the Irish theatre tradition—my lady and I recently saw an adaptation of Lady Gregory’s Grania in the Abbey, and it was absolutely fantastic, bold, naturalist, and yet truly open to our own way of telling, stylised, but also bold in a way the sparse can not be, for Fhionn is more truly told with thighs the size of houses than he is as six foot five and broad shouldered—throughout Ireland right now, and for the last several years, there is this blending of the avant-garde and our great telling, a new revival of sorts (but you see less of this in publicly performed poetry, or, perhaps I have seen less of this than I’d like, loathing dear diarism as I do), as we modify it now, confident again, strong again, free again and shaking those last fetters off, to tell our stories boldly now, not with nostalgia, but with flair . . . so perhaps that is the tradition to which I belong, the same mode that sees the rise in music of your Lankums, your ye Vagabonds, your Lisa O’Neill’s, your Caoimhín Ó Raghallaighs . . . I’d love to think so. But again, I don’t think it is my place to say whether my own work fits this greater cultural trend. That is for someone else to decide.
Yet, as a writer, you also somewhat hope that critique moves beyond such comparison, to see your work not as derivative, but influenced, as we all are, and as we all must be. And I believe, in my case, it did, thankfully. Honestly, I think, having reached forty, I believe, at this stage I have my own voice, and that I write, most of all, like myself, and I very much enjoy it too.
My next book will, I hope, help prove it.
AMMD: Given your wide international publication (from Australia to the United States), how do you see your œuvre engaging with the broader landscape of Anglophone poetry?
OB: It does seem fair to say there’s something universal, at least within the narrow remit of poetry readers, that can be found in at least some of my work, as well as something very very Irish.
The most accurate thing I can say is that my work engages with two specific things that have always mattered to readers, namely the pursuit of art and artistry, and an engagement with universal or eternal themes, i.e. a move beyond the personal to the universal, to the transcendent, or the space between things, rather than the purely denotative.
I would also say both of these things have been lacking in a broad swathe of contemporary poetry for quite some time, and I would argue that readers and audiences are far hungrier for art than they are for another interminable decade stuffed with the endless solipsistic dear diary cant lauded by many with their hand on the tiller in the poetry world.
For several decades, I’d say there has been a movement to foreground the ‘truth’ of a thing, or, more accurately, the ‘my truth’ of the thing, which hasn’t really been the most coherent of approaches. As far as I can see, it was broadly birthed as a result of, variously, the slow-burn impact of a host of literary theorists—probably beginning with people like Barthes, Iser, Jauss and Fish—as well as the ascendence of a host of philosophers, whose rise largely concluded with the irritating popular conflation of the idea that all truth is relational (agree), with the idea that all truth is relative, or of equal value (disagree). I blame this largely on the abandonment of philosophical study in schools, which created a circumstance in which many have lost the knowledge of how to apprehend when a proposition is valid or invalid, and when it is sound or unsound, so much so that many now think all opinion has an equal weight, regardless of a person’s knowledge—and the rise of intersectionality as a core creed (N.B. I’ve nothing against the fact that everything is intersectional, I mean, duh, but I don’t have to consider tiers of oppression or power dynamics in deciding whether I like yellow, or determining the quality of a piece of art, it’s utterly irrelevant to the question).
The poet Don Paterson has spoken quite eloquently on the subject. Indeed, Don goes so far as to explain the good intentions of his generation and how they led to a wider prioritising of ‘who’ over ‘what’ and ‘how’, but, as he himself came to realise, it has led to some fairly dire work, and a complete destabilisation in the concept of quality, so that we’re supposed to accept that there is no such thing as quality at all, merely taste, which creates the clearly ridiculous notion that, say, a Tik-Tok video of a man eating a hamburger has the same artistic value as Bob Dylan, or Rupi Kaur is actually in some way more than just a cipher for weepy greeting cards.
By culturally destabilising notions of ‘art’ and ‘artistry’—notions that the average person in the pub does actually get, even if not everyone in your local can articulate it—we basically decided to hand people a bowl of gone-off porridge, while insisting it’s oysters, which people naturally reject. As a result, we’ve come to a point where we can now look back at a several-decades long period of worthy Emperor’s New Clothes-ism, and I think that’s a problem, and one that only artistry and the pursuit of art can solve.
People do, in fact, want to read and hear work that is pursuing art, first and foremost: work that aims to hit the blue notes, those rare moments that make jazz fans holler, that make ballet audiences gasp, that lead quiet readers in cafés to laugh out loud, that endlessly fill the Prado and the Louvre. So, ultimately, I’d argue that if poetry isn’t trying to do that—trying and failing for the most part—then we really ought to bury it, and I think there’s a growing space in the Anglophone landscape for precisely this point, i.e. ‘enough of the woe is me, let’s get back to music, to sound, to beauty and to art!’
That’s the first area I’d highlight where work like mine does speak to the wider Anglophone landscape (and I should say, I’m not praising myself as brilliant here, merely noting that it’s something I do pursue); it’s taking an opposing side to the sort of stoner philosophy that makes seventeen year olds adore Cartesian confusion. A mature thinker, I’d argue, probably learns about the G.E. Moore shift, and goes: yeah that’ll do, let’s move on from this tralalaland of woe.
Now, as to the other point, namely those ‘universal or eternal themes’ that move to the ‘universal or transcendent’, there’s a glib saying I’m fond of: ‘A poet who hasn’t written a bird poem, isn’t a poet yet.’ I’m fairly sure I’m not the first person to say this, but I say it often, and I believe it.
I believe, too, that poets who don’t look up and describe the world beyond themselves and their own viewpoint, poet who don’t try to inhabit the world beyond themselves, or diarists with fan-clubs and wavy hands are, at best, immature writers.
The poet, the musician, the writer, the painter, I believe their job is to dig into things until you find the kernel, and even then their work isn’t done; they must nourish that kernel in new soil, uprooting it from its origin, exposing it to light, and water, and air, and never interfere with its becoming what it itself is set to be.
I read, and all those I know read, specifically to engage with the greater themes of life, the bigger parts of it, what makes us wonder, what makes us amazed—and, yes, certainly you can find awe in the banality of a bus ride, or in an old lady eating gums up a now-demolished pillar (see Joyce & Nelson’s pillar, or the ever splendid Virginia Woolf), but you do that by ennobling the theme, by making sure the work is the best it can be, not the most accurate to whatever it began life as, not by making sure it is accurate to you or whatever the nebulously defined ‘my truth’ of your day happens to be. You buy into the bigger, deeper reality. This, as an aspiration, is part of how I think my work fits the landscape.
Put simply, I think where my work, and the work of hundreds of others, stands at where the Anglophone and global landscape is in moving away from the doctrinaire orthodoxy of the canters, to re-embrace the pursuit of art and the universal and transcendent.
I’m extremely hopeful, too—unless the lunatics and fascists suddenly in charge of the US kill us all—that we’re quite close now to this renewal taking wider root.
AMMD: You were born in a country that was under British colonial rule for centuries, a history marked by at least two genocides often misrepresented as famines. In a previous conversation, you mentioned that while you primarily write in English, your work includes ‘a smattering of other languages’ when it fits the sound. I’m curious about the ethnolinguistic context you come from and write from—and write against.
OB: First of all, I want to say thank you for your honest and accurate understanding of my country’s history there. Far too often the banal propaganda of empire, even a faded one, tends to obfuscate reality and create rather loathsome engagements one is forced to endure (see, for instance, myself and two Zimbabwean girls at a party getting yelled at by a British filmmaker for refusing to accept that we were bloody well British and Rhodesian, respectively, no matter what we thought; or when, a few years back, a trust-funded German activist casually, without humour and thinking she was out of ear-shot, stated: ‘The Irish don’t really matter, they’re just dirty drunks that can’t even look after a potato.’).
I have a fascination with and love of the play and the music of language. This, more than anything else, comes from the Irish tradition of English. When we were forced at the end of a gun to abandon our language over one generation, the rapidity of the change meant a lot of our usages from Irish, our grammars, they hopped over where they could, and we also used forms, such as inversion (hardly ever had I X, when Y. . .) that were common in Irish, but fading at the time in English. This is how you get phrases like: I does be doing that, among myriad others. It’s also how you end up with Joyce. Our approach to English is informed by our culture, which is not about precision. We’re not trying to say things in the clearest or the most concise way, and for a Gael, brevity is not the soul of wit; wit is the soul of wit, and the best way to say something is in the most interesting, and often the most musical and beautiful way. Indeed, we don’t have an inch of that Teutonic influence toward say what you mean, man! Instead, half the value of a story, for us, is in its telling and in its receipt.
I write against poetry that does not understand for it to be a poem on any level, it must sing.
I’ll also say that for someone who grew up smack in the middle of the middle class (in Irish terms, not British or American, where middle class seems to imply multiple millions—for us it’s that you got a good education, and you grew up in a nice leafy area, usually in a four- or five-bed house, but you still had to work your way through everything and pay your own way), I had quite a bit of exposure to languages quite early on, even if I never fully learned that many of them. From an early age, I always had children’s books and videos and all those sorts of things in multiple languages. Plenty of classes, too, as well as a lot of travel, so I picked up smatterings of various languages that way, too. The exposure wasn’t really perfect in terms of ‘oh, now I speak X languages’, for I don’t. I speak German at a functional and occasionally playful level, although that’s a result of attending a German school for a while, and I’ve got low-level Irish (would that the empire hadn’t wiped our language out). What this did do for me though is give me both a structural understanding of language, parts of speech, function, and all that sort of jazz, and also give me a kind of plasticity. I may have forgotten at least thirty times what I once knew, but the pathways of language acquisition are rooted in, and I’m thankful for that.
Given this background in language, and an upbringing that always centred the fact that I am both ferociously Irish and also a citizen of Europe and the world, the use of various smatterings of languages in my work just makes sense. It’s what goes on in my daily life, and more or less always in the daily life of most of my friends, too. We all speak an cúpla focal, at least, in a number of languages.
This kind of background also ensured that I was always keen to read the writers of the world, if only in translation, so again, I never really felt centred in an ‘Anglophonic’ tradition, and there’s probably quite a lot of Anglophone writers you’d expect me to have read whom I haven’t, having tended to engage very often with translated texts.
AMMD: There’s an interesting line from a previous interview where you said:
I find the ‘accessibility’ crowd insult readers, as if complex turns of phrase, or daring efforts are essentially impossible for the lower stratae to understand, so we must dumb ourselves down. . .
OB: There’s been an idea that a poem ought to be obvious in its meaning, that it should avoid ambiguity, complexity, difficulty, and stylistic play; and, that if the writers succeeds in this, they reach the holy grail of being ‘authentic’ and ‘accessible’. This is so far and away from what and where I believe the value of art is, and it’s always infuriated me.
The literal purpose of poetry is ambiguity. Poetry is song! It is as much music as it is language. To insist that the poet has only recourse to ‘the cat is on the mat’ is to spend your life deliberately slicing off half of every human’s tongue. The wonder of poetry and of music is that that which was once noted by Stanley Fish, that the true text, the intentional text does exist, but that it is only ever approachable, never absolute. In saying this, Fish is also echoing the auld Neo-Mohist phrase I learned from Abrams’s excellent The Genie in the Lamp: ‘the reaching never reaches’—there is an infinitude that’s truly delicious in what we can sing. Indeed, I would argue that the idea of the poem as an artefact that must be approached in the same semantic fashion as one approaches a detailed text on the treaty of Westphalia is utterly daft.
The other side to it that vexes me, too, is that these venerations of ‘accessibility’ and ‘authenticity’, are extremely insulting to the working class and the undereducated. It implies that just because someone might not know, let’s say, the words perennial, spoor, and the ballet term cabriole, a writer should never use them. It’s madness. All three have musicality and delightful meanings, and all humans slowly figure out the meaning of words by reading—and every human being now has a dictionary in their pocket if they really must immediately know the meaning. Ultimately, I feel like the accessibility crowd are performing a triple disservice to those who lacked the fortune of a full education. They’re castrating language in advance of its receipt, so as not to make anything difficult. They’re implying that those with smaller vocabularies are too dumb to just bloody well learn the new words, and they’re implying that somehow a narrower vocabulary is just fine and dandy, and why would the oiks even want to read such grannnnnndiosityy—it’s absolutely nonsense.
I’ll conclude here by stating a belief of mine, specifically that the deeper and broader your vocabulary, the deeper and broader your consciousness. If you only know one way to understand purple, you know it through its differentiation with other colours. Get a handle on indigo and mauve, say, and Eureka, you’ve started finding the internal differences inside colour, and it becomes this chromatic joy. Learn the hundred different words for walking, or for talking, or for sorrow or for joy, and your understanding of that concept, through juxtaposition, differánce and reflexivity, oh boy it leaps like a salmon, and I can’t think of anything more tragically ridiculous than a movement of people asserting their desire to make things better for everyone that’s intent on taking an infinity of possible combinations, an uncountable glory of laughing and knowing, and reducing it to a 325-word pocket dictionary where the only word for love is love and the only way to speak of sorrow is to say you’re sad.
AMMD: The prose poem has long been associated with rebellion, from the French symbolists to the Arab modernists. As a writer of prose poems myself, I’m curious about what drew you to this form.
OB: Your analysis on rebellion and the longer-form poem is, of course, quite right, though I’d probably say for me, the ouevre is a little broader, in that I’m certainly also influenced by the traditional epic, and by longer-form works that are not of the prose poem form, including those by Dunbar, Henryson Thomson, and Blake. So there’s rebellion, but there’s also a kind of valorised ‘Ur’, and I most certainly lean into that too: a beyond, a limitlessness. I always, for instance, loved that in calculus, a number can approach zero but never reach it. That’s part of it. Another part of it is what I mentioned previously—the Irish language’s approach to find the best language is not the briefest. That’s an influence or drive there. I also, when younger, thought of myself more as an aspiring novelist than a poet, so wrote a lot in the novel form, although that’s certainly changed!
To be honest, the real reason I write longform is that I absolutely love it. I love the big canvas, the grand approach, the fact that I can take a motif and turn it and play with it and develop it. To me the question is more why wouldn’t you write longform? Why would I limit myself to writing a wee ditty when I can write a symphony? So, rebellion really doesn’t inform my desire to use this form, it’s a much simpler thing. I love the scale of it. It’s an ocean of sound.
AMMD: Poetry for the page vs. poetry for the stage—what differentiates them in terms of their creative process?
OB: Honestly, I don’t actually think there should be a single smidgen of difference. It’s a pet hate of mine how absurdly awful so many page poets are at reading. The poet should sing their words. Also learn how to speak into a microphone. There’s a damn lot of hard of hearing folks, myself included, at poetry events, so if you talk in a high pitched whisper, we’re just politely staring at a ceiling for ten minutes. If all this proves hard, go to an improv class, then try again. The only area the page poet usually lacks is they have zero stage presence. Artistry takes time, stage presence can be learned in a day, if you’re willing to break your comfort zone.
On the other hand, ‘spohhhhken woooohrd’, Christ it’s almost uniformly dire. Yes, they do internal rhymes, and oh, they’re being mildly topical and mildly quirky with ‘poems’ about my mouse and Margaret Thatcher’s death (I saw this one, it was awful). A good page poet is always a thousand times better than ‘spoken word’, which is essentially a synonym for stand-up comedy without the jokes.
So, aye, I believe one is poetry that merely suffers from an issue with page poets not attending drama classes when they were teenagers, whereas the other is simply not poetry.
I should add, by the by, I’m not speaking of the oral tradition here, or poetry told by the fire without notes. That’s a different matter altogether. What differentiates the oral from the page poet is a question that really is best answered by the storytellers still with us, but I’d say, like all improvisational forms, it relies instead on learning a series of base phrases, rhymes, and narratives, which then become the hand that keeps the beat, and then building on it, and always making sure to rise and fall in rhythm, to create those Todorovian events in each topical series of verses, so you begin with a state of affairs, process through a schism, then return to a new order. It’s part acting, part jazz, part bed-time story, part punk revelry, and part poetry.
AMMD: Are there Irish poets, contemporary ones or those from antiquity, whom you think the world should not miss out on and you wish to be read more globally?
OB: From ‘today’, in addition to the ex-Beir Bua Press lot (John Sexton, Marian Christie, Jeremy Allan Hawkins, Nathannael O’Reilly, Teo Eve, Vik Shirley, Martina Collender, Aodán McCardle, and Paul Ingram): Alan Gillis, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Annemarie Ní Churreáin, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Gerard Smyth, Eavan Boland, Gerald Beirne, and S.C. Flynn.
From the past? Honestly, there’s so many, and we’ve already touched on my biggest favourites, i.e. Kavanagh, Heaney, Yeats et al., but I’ll say this, if you want to understand Irish poetry better, dig into the old myths, find what you can of the Yellow Book of Lecan, say, read the cycles, read the Táin, listen to our traditional songs, find the music in them, read about and listen to keening, and go to a wake and drink a shedload of whiskey and talk to and sing with the dead. That’s the stuff of poetry.
Oisín Breen is the author of Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín (Downingfield Press, 2023), Flowers, All Sorts in Blossom, Figs, Berries, and Fruits Forgotten (Dreich Press, 2020), and The Kerygma (forthcoming September 2025 from Salmon Poetry). Born in Dublin, Breen is a poet, at times a short-story writer and essayist, an occasional analyst, and a financial journalist covering the registered investment advisory space in the United States. His poems have been published across continents: Books Ireland, North Dakota Quarterly, Quadrant, Southword, The Tahoma Literary Review, Poetry Wales, Meniscus Australia, The Belfast Review, Poetry Northwest, BOMB Magazine, and elsewhere. He is also an accomplished performer of poetry with training in drama and the stage, and a former EFL (English as a Foreign Language) instructor.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them), Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Philippines, is the author of three books of prose poetry and lyric essays including M of the Southern Downpours (Australia: Downingfield Press, 2024). Their works—published from South Africa to Japan, France to Singapore, and translated into Chinese, Damiá, and Swedish—appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, Michigan Quarterly Review, Sant Jordi Festival of Books, and the anthologies Infinite Constellations (University of Alabama Press) and He, She, They, Us: Queer Poems (Macmillan UK). Formerly with Creative Nonfiction magazine, they’ve been nominated to The Best Literary Translations and twice to the Pushcart Prize for their lyric essays. Find more at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.
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