Stephen de Búrca
Stephen de Búrca is a writer from Galway, based in Belfast. He completed an MFA at the University of Florida (2020) and a Doctorate (including research examining the sea in Derek Mahon’s poetry and funded by the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council) at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast (2025). He has received Arts Council Agility Awards (2022 and 2023) and was selected for the inaugural Poetry Ireland Gerald Dawe Poetry Bursary (2026). Atlantic Fret is his first collection.
Atlantic Fret
A man, folded into himself
like an accordion, sits on his front step.
We nod as if we know each other.
— ‘Sailor’s Warning’
Atlantic Fret unveils a focus, indeed a constancy of purpose, uncommon in a first collection. From the Blasket Islands in the opening poem to Iceland — the book concluding with adaptations of an Icelandic modernist classic — Stephen de Búrca embraces the idea of the Atlantic Ocean as the source of chaos from which the Cosmos grew. Against the backdrop of climate change the Ocean shares the burden of grief while offering a space for sexual freedom and self-expression.
In its impressive range of formal attainment, including the elegiac title sequence and the imaginative ‘Tide Clock’ sequence, Atlantic Fret reveals a writer sensitively attuned to inner and outer tensions, ‘to what the reeds, / curving like fishing rods, might be reeling in — // the shadows of small fish, the currents / at odds with one another, the river coming to terms / with sea water’. The result is a poetry collection that is genuinely affecting.
