Southword Poetry Podcast · Munster Literature Centre

David Nash: No Man's Land

·50 min·4 clips

David Nash reveals how learning other languages makes his English poetry deliberately strange and surprising.

Cliona begins with surprise. David Nash, she suggests, seemed to arrive almost fully formed, even with the pamphlet before the first collection. The praise stays close to the poems. She lingers on his formal touch, especially the sonnet, and on the sly pressure of wrong lines and non-lines. No Man's Land then opens out. The prose poem sequence sits inside a book busy with loss, language, ecology, and play. Register is part of the pleasure. Cliona hears Nash shifting diction, using demotic language and code switching, then asks him to unpack it. That question takes the episode toward Irish words inside English poems, and toward a grandfather. The guest says Irish has changed the local English because it moves differently. From there, ecology joins the conversation. Flora and fauna pull in linguistics, biodiversity, folklore, folk knowledge, land knowledge, sea knowledge, and inherited vocabulary. Loss keeps pressing underneath. Nash says the book is concerned with heritage, environmental barrenness, and what vanishes when certain words no longer have work to do. Personal loss is folded into that outside world, where damaged land and a weakened native language answer each other after a colonial past. The final reading turns inward, ending on fragile selves, suffering by proxy, care, and aging undone.

As heard by us

A poet's formal play opens into loss, ecology, and language across the Irish landscape.

David Nash: No Man's Land comes across as a poet working with real formal control and a taste for play, especially in the sonnets, the wrong and non-lines, and the long prose-poem sequence at the book's center.

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Why you'd press play

For listeners drawn to sonnets, wrong lines, Irish words, demotic speech, and ecological loss.

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