Pádraig Ó Tuama Recalls the Estuary Behind 'Love Between Men'

Pádraig Ó Tuama's new poetry collection "Love Between Men" was released in 2026. It traces back to a gray November afternoon in 1987 Ireland, when a car bearing the registration plate CZ 680 passed an estuary where he had sat alone every day for several years.

He watched it go. Then he wrote a poem. He told NPR Wild Card host Rachel Martin: "That car does not know how beautiful this place is." Three elements entered the verse:

• The car with plate CZ 680
• The gray November light
• The mudflats left behind as the water drew out

The Wild Card interview, archived on NPR's website, places the book against the conditions of its making. The collection extends a body of work that has long examined faith and sexuality.

How did writing begin?

Ó Tuama said he knew around the age of 11 or 12 that he was gay. He knew he had to keep it secret. "The two things came at the same time," he told Martin. "It was 1987 in Ireland."

Poetry became the channel for both. "I would write in all kinds of terrible metaphors, you know, or sometimes code that I forgot how to decipher," he said. The act carried urgency. The practice carried a double charge from the start, working as code for what could not be spoken aloud and as a channel for unguarded joy.

Asked when verse stopped being a place to work out his own sexuality, Ó Tuama said it never fully did. It was also expression. Poetry drew him in times of deep happiness as well. The estuary memory stands as proof of that second claim.

What does the interview change for readers of the new collection?

The conversation frames "Love Between Men" against the historical conditions of its making. His earliest verses, composed in clandestine conditions, served as tools for survival and tools for delight in a country where being openly gay carried measurable personal and social cost.

The 1987 setting, the estuary, and the car with plate CZ 680 anchor the work in a specific adolescent interior. Readers approaching the new book can expect verse that retains that doubled register.

Ó Tuama used two words on the program to describe his craft: flourishing and exorcism. Asked about them, he laughed and said, "we all need both." The line could serve as a working definition of his career, and a road map for the collection.

What else did the conversation surface?

The interview also produced one of the program's lighter exchanges. Asked what adulthood would look like as a child, Ó Tuama answered about his hair. His mother used to cut it. The results were uneven. He turned up at school at 14 with parts too long and parts stubble. A friend asked, in his recollection, "God Almighty, what happened to you?"

The haircut, he said, came to symbolise independence. It was the idea of being able to make a decision and not have to ask permission for it. He now wears loose curls, he said. He stopped combing them.

That small story sits within the larger arc that connects a teenager at the estuary, an adult who stopped combing his hair, and a new book about love between men. "Love Between Men" carries forward the task Ó Tuama described to Martin: a private craft that processes private fear and private joy in the same lines.

The full conversation between Martin and Ó Tuama is available on YouTube under the NPR Wild Card banner. The book is out now.