Modern & Contemporary Poetry

A 'howdie-skelp' is the slap in the face a midwife gives a newborn. It's a wake-up call. A call to action.The poems in Paul Muldoon's striking new collection include a nightmarish remake of The Waste Land, an elegy for his fellow …

'Every poem in this book is a marvel. Taken all together they make up a work of almost miraculous depth and beauty' Sally Rooney 'A poetry debut fit to compare with Seamus Heaney. This wonderful long poem is up there with the grea…

A hardback reprint of the classic Irish Pages issue on Seamus Heaney to commemorate the tenth anniversary of his death on 30 August 2013. "So many people in Ireland and overseas read, admired, and watched him. The extraordinary d…

Jiving with Wasps is a new retrospective from Rita Ann Higgins drawing on a dozen books of poetry published over four decades, from Goddess on the Mervue Bus (1986) to The Long Weekend (2024), in addition to new poems appearing he…

Since his 1973 debut, New Weather, Paul Muldoon has created some of the most original and memorable poetry of the past half century. Joy in Service on Rue Tagore sees him writing with the same verve and distinction that have consi…

First published in 1956 when he was twenty-two years old, Let Us Compare Mythologies is Leonard Cohen's first collection of poetry. It is an accomplished and passionate collection which demonstrates Cohen's remarkably assured voic…

Louis Mulcahy was born in Wexford in 1941. He is a well-known potter who sings and has four collections of poetry, of which one is in Irish. The first three were published by An Sagart Publishing. A Potter's Book was brought out i…

In Neanderthal Boy, Colm Scully's latest poetry collection, history - both personal and political - unfolds through the lens of myth and memory. With a masterful touch, Scully intertwines the past and present, drawing connections …

Jessica Traynor’s New Arcana explores grief, bad boyfriends and the power of female friendship through readings of the Tarot and Tim Burton movies. Moving from teenage friendship and destructive relationships towards a tangling wi…

New Weather was Paul Muldoon's first book of poems. When it appeared in 1973, Seamus Heaney described its author as 'unusually gifted, endowed with an individual sense of rhythm, a natural and copious vocabulary, a technical accom…

Winner of the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize An extraordinary debut from a young Vietnamese American, Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a book of poetry unlike any other.Steeped in war and cultural upheaval and wielding a fresh new language, …

This edition of Seamus Heaney's seminal fourth collection North, reproduced in its elegant first setting and in its original jacket, marks fifty years since first publication in 1975. By conjuring aspects of a shared Northern Euro…

Stevie Smith was not only a famous poet in her lifetime but a poet before her time, a radical eccentric who relished the performance of poetry as sung and spoken word. The poems are distinctly unsentimental as she casts the 'eye o…

The new collection from the legendary Atwood is led by the story of a married couple as they travel the road together, the moments big and small that make up a long life of love -- and what comes after My heart is broken, Nell thi…

Another wild, expansive collection from the eternally surprising Pulitzer Prize–winning poetSmuggling diesel; Ben-Hur (the movie, yes, but also Lew Wallace's original book, and Seosamh Mac Grianna's Gaelic translation); a real tri…

In this remarkable second collection, Seán Hewitt describes a journey haunted by love, loss and estrangement - from one of the Sunday Times 30 under 30 in Ireland'An exquisitely calm and insightful lyric poet'MAX PORTER, author of…

Cnuasach é seo a chaitheann súil ar chruachás an duine agus é i ngleic le fírinní éagsúla an tsaoil — agus leis na bréaga. Ón am i láthair go dtí an t-am atá caite — agus fiú go haimsir chaite nach raibh riamh ann — tugtar sinn ar…

Refugee is a powerful word. One that conjures opposing emotions. For some it provokes feelings of fear and hate, for others the need for compassion, understanding, and empathy.In this celebrated poem, "Refugees," Brian Bilston tel…

With a new introduction by the multi-prizewinning young poet Kayo Chingonyi. For over forty years, until his death in 1967, Langston Hughes captured in his poetry the lives of black people in the USA. This edition is Hughes's own …

Selected Poems contains Neruda's resonant, exploratory, intensely individualistic verse, rooted in the physical landscape and people of Chile. Here we find sensuous songs of love, tender odes to the sea, melancholy lyrics of heart…

This selection, which was made by Eliot himself, is intended as an introduction to the main body of his poetry prior to Four Quartets, which is available separately in Faber Paperbacks. The selection includes the whole of The Wast…

Throughout these poems, with their roaming sense of first-person, there is depth at work where the speakers' minds are cavernous and echoic, primal and sophisticated, observant and raw, in and out of control of themselves. The eff…

'Though unmarried I have had six children,' Walt Whitman claimed in a letter late in his life. The title poem of Mark Ford's third collection imagines the great poet's getting of these mysterious children, of whom no historical t…

Paul Muldoon has been interested in writing for music for at least twenty years, over which time he has collaborated with composers as various as Mark-Anthony Turnage, Warren Zevon, and Wayside Shrines, the Princeton-based musical…

Poetry of how we shape what is lost or past, and how it shapes us. Bernard O'Donoghue investigates anchorage as a place we build for ourselves out of memory and story. The Ireland of his youth is rich in colour and precise in deta…

The Coming Thing is a brilliant long narrative poem. It is not Evans's first: she has become celebrated for work on this scale, spoken, dramatic, abundant. She has been justly acclaimed by, among others, Colm Toibin.He says of her…

The Confidential Clerk was first produced at the Edinburgh Festival in the summer of 1953. 'The dialogue of The Confidential Clerk has a precision and a lightly felt rhythm unmatched in the writing of any contemporary dramatist.'…

For the poet and activist June Jordan, neither poetry nor activism could easily be disentangled from the other. Her storied career came to chronicle a living, breathing history of the struggles that defined the USA in the latter h…

Amanda Gorman's powerful and historic poem 'The Hill We Climb,' read at President Joe Biden's inauguration, is now available as a collectible gift edition. 'Stunning' CNN 'Dynamic' NPR'Deeply rousing and uplifting' VogueOn 20 Janu…

A forceful and moving final volume from one of the most masterful poets of the twentieth century.Throughout her nearly sixty-year career, acclaimed poet Eavan Boland came to be known for her exquisite ability to weave myth, histor…