Gerard Quinlan has written a love letter to Dublin, but it is not the kind of love letter tourists write. It is the kind that only long-term residents can write; complicated, clear-eyed, deeply affectionate, honest about the city’s flaws and more honest about its extraordinary human richness. Spin the Wheel Spin (Four O’clock Buzz): Weeds Between the Cobbles is that letter, and it deserves to be read by everyone who cares about the city it celebrates.
The collection opens in the late afternoon, at the hour when the official city, the city of tourist attractions and literary landmarks; begins to give way to the real city of commuters and closing shops, of people heading home with shopping or cycling furiously through traffic. This is the city Quinlan knows, and he renders it with the authority of deep familiarity.
The Human Texture of Urban Life
What strikes you most forcefully in these poems is their attention to the human texture of city life. Quinlan is not interested in Dublin as an abstraction or a symbol. He is interested in the specific people who inhabit it, the cyclist losing their temper, the gallery visitor pausing before a painting, the worker in the sorting room, the cousin remembered in an old photograph.
Each of these people is rendered with remarkable economy and precision. Quinlan does not give us backstory or psychology. He gives us a moment, a gesture, an expression; and from these precise observations, whole lives emerge. It is the technique of the great short story writers applied to poetry, and it produces results of comparable power and compression.
The working-class Dublin that emerges from these portraits is a place of genuine community, of mutual recognition and shared experience, of the small dignities and small frustrations that constitute ordinary urban life. It is neither idealised nor deplored. It simply is, and in being rendered with such honest attention, it becomes something worth celebrating.
The Quiet Radicalism of Ordinary Beauty
There is a quietly radical act at the heart of this collection: the insistence that ordinary beauty matters. Not the beauty of sunsets over the Grand Canal or light on the Liffey, but the beauty of dust particles floating in gallery light, the beauty of a field recently ploughed, the beauty of a brief, unremarkable afternoon in a public space.
This insistence is radical because it challenges the hierarchies of significance that structure so much of our cultural life. If a sorting room is as worth writing about as a country house, if a cycling commuter is as interesting as a statesman, then the whole machinery of cultural value is thrown into question. Quinlan does not make this argument explicitly, but his practice enacts it on every page.
The result is a collection that feels politically alive without being narrowly political — one that implicitly argues for a more democratic and more generous understanding of what constitutes significant human experience, while remaining entirely focused on the pleasures of the poem and the specific reality it describes.
A Final Invitation
This review ends where it began: with an invitation to read Gerard Quinlan‘s collection. It is an invitation worth extending to any reader who loves poetry, who loves Dublin, who loves good writing about ordinary human experience, or who simply wants to be reminded that the world is more interesting and more beautiful than it usually appears.
The title Spin the Wheel Spin (Four O’clock Buzz): Weeds Between the Cobbles is a little unwieldy, it must be said, but the book it names is beautifully made and deeply felt. It will reward any reader who comes to it with the same quality of patient, open attention that its poet brings to everything he observes.
Find it, read it, and then go outside and look at the weeds growing between your own cobblestones. You will find, if you look carefully enough, that they have quite a lot to say.
