Hoopoe

A man was taken out with no small skill
two months before this June’s elections.
Conspiracies and dark connections
are eddying through some of the weeklies still.

But there’s no lead. The public’s had its fill.
Attention turns back to old factions
and the usual dissatisfactions.
The politician argues with his shill.

The hit-man, he gets rich
and lives beyond the scope
of the curious and the keen

much like the hoopoe which
is widespread throughout Europe
and seldom to be seen.

Hoopoe was published in the TLS in 2010.

Justin Quinn was born in Dublin in 1968 and educated there at Trinity College. With David Wheatley, he was a founding editor of the Irish poetry magazine, Metre. His translations of the Czech poet Petr Borkovec, From the Interior, appeared in 2008 from Seren. He is Associate Professor of American and English Literature at Charles University, Prague and also lectures at the Department of English, Pedagogical Faculty of the University of Western Bohemia, and is a contributing editor of Contemporary Poetry Review. Currently he is working on a book on transnational poetry in English.

His poetry has appeared in the Yale Review, TLS, Poetry Review, Irish Times, The New Yorker, Poetry Ireland Review, Souvislosti, and the Irish Review among others. Tomáš Fürstenzeller translated his poetry into Czech (Vlny a stromy; Opus, 2009).