Category: Poetry

Accurate Measurements by Adam White is unusual in that it is a poetic celebration of the world of manual labour, of craftsmanship and doing things in the right way. There...

Age of the Microwave Dinner explores where we are as a society, along with universal themes of heartbreak, family, relationships, and death. Renowned for his thought-provoking work, these poems are...

In Ah, Men! Lewis considers what it means to be male in 21st century Ireland.

Consists of poems written over a five-year period which interrogate nature —specifically the sea — in order to broach perennial human concerns as ageing, loss and love, as well as...

An Experience on the Tongue bristles with vivid imagery and candid voices. Various threads weave throughout as we are deftly lead through changing landscapes by a diverse cast of characters...

Bloodroot explores the frailty and complexity of human relationships, often addressing the question of what it means to ‘belong’ in the world.

Moyra Donaldson’s Bone House is furious in its range, depth and grief. It is the work of a poet fully alive to the moments of pure light ‘before the darkness...

By the Light of Four Moons is a journey through the personal and the universal. Inspired by private and public events and by the landscapes which have always been central...

Drawing on myth, nature and memory, the poems in Carnivorous speak of the extraordinary in the ordinary. Fluidity of self and of time, and evocation of the natural world, our...

Catholic Boy is a collection of contemporary short stories, set mainly in Belfast, but also abroad. Some stories are witty but all make serious points about our current society.

It aims to achieve a fuller understanding of the physics that lies within the realm of ordinary experience and to find continuities between themes of motherhood, family, science and technology...

Kimberly Campanello is attempting something new, something challenging and inspiring and radical, something that hasn’t been seen before in contemporary Irish poetry… not only does she succeed in this attempt,...

Empty House is a multi-genre anthology of Irish and international writing responding to the climate crisis. The leading challenge facing our world today, here writers share pieces that address what...

The poems in Fear Knot are heightened by Susan’s evocative use of language and metaphor, layered by her skillful weaving of the intricacies of the human condition.  

In her debut collection of short fiction, Augé creates poignant and accurate outlines of the women and their places in the world. Against the backdrop of modern Ireland, she tells...

First the Feathers interrogates the position of the human in the natural world as a backdrop to a personal and political exploration of what it means to be alive —...

Four Thousand Keys, Linda McKenna’s second full-length poetry collection, explores themes of dispossession, dislocation and life on the margins between history and story. Combining archival sources, myth, family stories, ekphrasis...

Furey is Everyman, conflicted, childish, narrow, thwarted and afraid. He’s angry at life, both his own and others’. He suffers fools very gladly, hunts life and often gets lost in...

Growing up in Colour articulates the silence and strangeness of the familiar and inhabits the shadowy terrain of growing up in a fast-changing Ireland, of what happened and what might...

Home is Neither Here Nor There, the debut poetry collection by Nandi Jola, explores the themes of Home, migration and the fragile relationships between human, animals and morals. As a...

Here are poems of wonder, imagination, grief, bewilderment and delight. Drawing on an awareness formed during a rural childhood, they record the natural world and the way we, as humans,...

A Kashmiri poet, who writes in English, spent his youth in New York and wound up in Ireland to win the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, Rafiq became the first non-Irish...

In Spring We Turned to Water is the first full-length collection of poetry from Michael Dooley. It brings together poems of intricate watchfulness and stunning revelation from the natural world....

The poems in In the Museum of Misremembered Things revolve around the local, the historic and the mythic. Linda McKenna’s poems are based around historical events and themes with a...

Inheritance, the debut poetry collection by farmer-poet Miceál Kearney, include poems that convey both the beauty and the brutality of life on the farm.

Island takes its inspiration from the poet’s ancestors, who lived their lives, farming and fishing on Copeland Island off the County Down coast.

Jewtown explores the journey of Jewish people who escaped the pogroms in Russia in the late 19th century, eventually settling in Cork City.

Keeping Bees is rooted in the sensual, celebrating the vibrant nature of the body in and out love. The poetry is raw and brave, joyful and funny.

Liberty Terrace features a bevy of characters who reside in a fictional area of Cork City in the period 2016 to 2020. The inhabitants of Liberty Terrace come and go,...

Lifestyle Choice 10mg is a collection of Belfast short stories that wittily deals with relationships in contemporary society as well as the repercussions of the Troubles on its latter-day residents.

Liffey Sequence explores pressing issues of identity, ecology and social exclusion. This new three-part collection by the award-winning Bray-based writer includes the title eleven-poem sequence, which examines themes such as...

It is what every serious writer sets out to do — to give voice to characters that do not have one. Susan writes in a very considered way about characters...

Without dross, woven with her rich poetic language, the poems in Line of Drift continue to paint Rowland’s narrative-lyric poems, immersed in and emerging from, the physical and historical landscapes...

Love’s Enterprise Zone is a rich and diverse collection in which the poet explores experimental and performance poetry with themes that evoke both the political and the everyday, with language...

Starting with windmills, Milling the Air takes a slant look at the energy of airwaves, the air we breathe.

Mosaics from the Map draws on historical links between countries to explore war and change through personal story, making history intimate. Alcock and Brown, as well as Marconi feature in...

Μηδέν | Oὐδέν is a collection that turns, returns and turns on language. Zeroing in on grief, memory and fucking, Xidous plays with images and the space between them. Each...

We travel with a keenly observant man, and one of many moods; we glimpse his loves — of family, of nature and of the changing seasons, for example – share...

Off-Kilter sees the environment and the body under pressure—the landscape burns, the body sickens, relationships fracture. Threat looms large, yet these poems also chart a tentative path through the darkness....

Palm Wine Tapper and The Boy at Jericho is the diary of a woman’s journey from the nature-rich countryside and the red-sanded desert to the Lego-like city. Written in the...

The poems in Peacekeeper reveal the little known landscapes and events experienced by soldiers sent to keep the peace in highly volatile situations — experiences and events that stay part...

Describing and reflecting on home, habitat, and environment, the poems traverse the boundaries of the surreal, mining the realms of historical and personal myth, to pose coherent questions.

Revolutions of Humming Things explores a sense of belonging and home in a contemporary Ireland in a state of flux.

Riptide explores the zeitgeist using the art of Edvard Munch as a counterpoint, delving into the ecological and spiritual anguish informing his paintings, finding parallels in the world we live...

On the centenary of the Great War and the Irish Revolution, Rules of Engagement explores an Irish soldier-poet’s search for truth and meaning, his efforts to reconcile his place in...

Surprised by how few literary references exist for the Spanish ‘Flu pandemic of 1918/19, William Wall made a conscious decision to document the experience of ‘the strangest year we have...

Some of These Stories are True seek out the mystery in everyday urban life in a conversational tone, often with dark humour, exploring hints of the extraordinary in the quotidian,...

A fine debut collection, O’Shea is a poet of many talents (review by Kevin Higgins, Galway Advertiser).

The Cloud Architect is the third full-length poetry collection by Kinsale-based poet Matthew Geden. This new collection looks at the world through the smoke and mirrors which cloud and hide...

The Conversation is a collaborative poetry collection by Jo Burns and Emily Cooper which imagines a conversation held between Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar and Françoise Gilot, three of Picasso’s lovers...

The poems in The Day of the Three Swans work with the sense of place, the shifting ground of emotion and the pressure of politics and external events. There are...

The Heart and the Arrow includes the novella ‘All Those Men’, a tale of women surviving together in a dystopian future where food is collected at central points organised by...

The Lie of the Land is a beautiful mix of poems rooted in the landscape Elaine grew up in and those she discovered on some of her travels.

We’re presented throughout this collection with a kaleidoscope of the twists and turns and tricks of life — surprising, pleasurable, scary, unsettling, deadly, ordinary. There’s a dizzying mix of settings...

This fourth collection from Louis Mulcahy reflects on fifty years working in clay. It ranges from the classic pots of the Chinese Sung Dynasty through those of the Japanese. Tea...

The Rag Tree Speaks is concerned with a sense of place, particularly questioning Irishness and the myriad voices within that familiar trope, trying to cut through easy clichés to explore...

The poems in The Space Between pick up on everyday incidents, expanding them in novel ways, creating miniature gems of acute observation on relationships or the domestic with a sprinkling...

In The Weather-Beaten Scarecrow, the second poetry collection by James Finnegan, he focuses on place, history, nature, movement, animal, landscape, humanity and what it means to have clear space for...

The Woman on the Other Side is a book of exploration. The poetry invites the readers into a world of fragments, between physical and internal landscapes.

These are My People, the third collection by award-winning poet Breda Wall Ryan, explores themes of family ties, relationships and one’s connection to the natural world. In it the poet...

This Little World focuses both on the internal subjective world that we inhabit due to social media and 24/7 access to news sources, as well as the little worlds we...

An older sister gathers her demons and journeys to Lorient, seeking closure with her estranged brother and his over-protective wife; a group of people holidaying in ‘Three Houses in Rome’...

This compelling collection presents twelve character-driven short stories that are set in London, New York and Ireland. The stories are populated with characters who are forced to deal with a...

The poems in What Else is There? are concerned with displacement and the consequences of this. Its immediate, literal manifestation in the book is the type of displacement Michael D....

For her, poetry is about playing with the words until something is revealed. The journey is everything, the destination something she knows is mostly out of her hands (review by...