Southword Poetry Podcast · Munster Literature Centre

Gail McConnell: The Sun Is Open

·1 hr 3 min·5 clips

Gail McConnell enters through admiration, but the episode quickly gets sharper than that. The host starts with fierce honesty, found material, the physical feel of language, and the pressure McConnell's poems put on words and forms. Ciaran Carson matters here. The host asks how his work moves through hers, especially in fragmentation, close attention to the real, and Belfast poetry's heavy inheritance. McConnell's answer keeps coming back to form. Carson's Belfast Confetti helps as a comparison, less as a neat influence than as a way to think about words under strain. The Sun Is Open tightens that pressure. McConnell describes reading report language around a father's murder and feeling how badly its form fit the event it claimed to hold. At first, that mismatch creates irony. Another poem, she says, circles the same material and tries for language closer to both the adult speaker and the child self. Parenting makes the question harder. Becoming a parent as part of a queer couple brings an imagined future child into contact with the child who experienced the event second hand. The archive is the dad box. Newspaper cuttings and media reports become the way the event is met at a distance, not remembered as one clean scene. The book opens with a note. A report-like note about March 6th, 1984 gives way to poems that pull found language apart and ask where breath and mouth can start again. The readings change the air in the room. By the closing passage, with illness, bedside vigil, and bodily vulnerability, the talk about form no longer feels abstract. The episode keeps circling one hard problem: how a poem can use public language without obeying it, and how private grief can take shape without being softened into comfort.

As heard by us

A careful interview about found materials, form, and the making of a book from public record.

Southword Poetry Podcast treats Gail McConnell's The Sun Is Open with real care. It moves best when it traces the line from Ciaran Carson's Belfast legacy to McConnell's own work, because the praise stays rooted in the poems themselves: fragmentation, shading, shaping, and the…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

For when you want poetry criticism that stays close to found material, form, and lineage.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Southword Poetry Podcast