Munster Literature Centre
32 episodes listed below
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The Southword Poetry Podcast is produced by the Munster Literature Centre. Each episode, a guest poet talks in depth about their latest work and shares a few of their poems. We also hear a poem from a recent issue of the literary journal Southword. Sarah Byrne hosted the 2022 season. Clíona Ní Ríordáin hosted the 2024 and 2025 seasons. Poets were selected by the hosts, Patrick Cotter and James O’Leary. The Munster Literature Centre is a grateful recipient of funding from the Arts Council of Ireland and the Arts Office of Cork City Council.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Poets connect formal choices to memory, history and language before their work is heard aloud.
Southword Poetry Podcast puts close reading beside the poet's own voice, moving from searching conversation into carefully placed readings. Cliona Ni Riordain asks about the choices inside particular collections, giving guests room to connect language and form with personal…
Cliona Ni Riordain asks when a poem is finished; your third draft suddenly has company.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A debut collection weighed through craft, publishing power, and the politics of language.
Southword Poetry Podcast gives Isabel Baffey's debut collection a thoughtful framing, especially when it places the book against the expectations tied to Faber and the London poetry scene.
A measured, thoughtful conversation about translation, motherhood, and the making of poems.
Southward Poetry Podcast centers on an Irish-language poet and translator, and that lens opens naturally into translation, minority-language writing, and literary precedent.
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.
A focused poetry conversation about Afrika Moke's shift toward sequence and the long poem.
The Southword Poetry Podcast episode tracks Afrika Moke's move from very concise early poems to sequence and the long poem. That arc gives the conversation its shape, and it works best when it stays close to the craft: the long title, the playfulness and in-jokes, the pull of…
A translation project that turns archival history into a quiet, forceful argument.
Paisley Rekdal's conversation on Southword Poetry Podcast gives West a Translation a clear center: a Chinese poem carved into the walls of Angel Island Immigration Station.
A steady poetry conversation where class, craft, and belief stay closely linked.
The conversation keeps its focus on Michael O'Loughlin as a poet whose work sits between class memory, national identity, and form. Patrick's interest feels grounded in shared working class experience, and the poems land because they speak to feelings he had not found elsewhere,…
A steady interview that turns domestic care into emotional pressure.
Matthew Dickman's Husbandry comes across as a book about care in the everyday sense: fatherhood, separation, and the endless, bodily work of laundry, washing, feeding, and bathing. It does not soften the harder parts either.
A careful interview about form, return, and poetry's second wind.
Traci Brimhall's Love Prodigal makes a clear case for sovereign, independent lyrics, even as the poems keep returning to divorce, a fall back into romantic love, family habit, illness, trauma, and a renewed relationship with poetry.
Two classical-education teachers slow-read novels like Jane Eyre, chapter by chapter.
Book talk with room to wander.
Gail McConnell is approached with blunt, careful honesty.
Gerry Murphy comes in through Patrick's memory before anything else.
Cork matters here.
Mary O'Malley comes in through publication history.
First, a reading from 2010.
Sexton's poems arrive like thresholds.
Debra Paredes arrives through questions of language.
Translation sits close to the center.
Patrick begins with a formal objection: can a poetry collection built around return stay alive, or does it start packing filler?
Matthew Dickman comes in through vulnerability.
Michael O'Loughlin comes in through class recognition.
McSweeney comes into view through translation.
Faber casts a long shadow.
David Nash arrives almost fully formed, at least in Cliona's telling.
It starts with a title.