Dedalus Press

Local Wonders is a major event in the Irish poetry calendar, an anthology of new poems from all over the island of Ireland, and beyond, recording and celebrating a rediscovery of precious places, precious things, and a renewed focus on what we love in these uncertain and challenging times. What do we love? What sustains or inspires us, consoles or simply distracts us when our troubles might otherwise threaten to overwhelm? The past 18 months or so have made many of us question so much about our lives. Somehow, too, they have also shown us how to see again, have lead us both to tiny discoveries and monumental realisations, often almost right there on our doorsteps.

If Ever You Go: A Map of Dublin in Poetry and Song is a unique invitation to explore, street by street, one of the world's most famous literary capitals through the poems and songs it has inspired down the ages, from both residents and visitors alike

From treasures in museums to paintings in galleries and churches, from first impressions of the unfamiliar to fresh takes on the well-known and -loved, the triggers behind the poems in Pat Boran’s seventh collection in the main depart from the poet’s trademark starting point of autobiography.

From treasures in museums to paintings in galleries and churches, from first impressions of the unfamiliar to fresh takes on the well-known and -loved, the triggers behind the poems in Pat Boran’s seventh collection in the main depart from the poet’s trademark starting point of autobiography. Instead in Then Again his focus is very much outwards, with the poems comprising a mini Odyssey that takes in parts of Ireland, Paris, Sicily, Cyprus and elsewhere, finding along the way the echoes of earlier discoveries and deeper concerns. The book’s title acknowledges both the unexpected returns and the subsequent re-evaluations that memory occasions as it makes new connections between present and past, between our personal journeys and our shared fate.

Poets from the new Irish communities, the so-called hyphenated Irish, the Irish of mixed cultural, linguistic or ethnic origin, gather here to chart and reflect the changing nature of Irish society. Addressing the broad theme of home, these writers, who hail from all over the world, explore some of the most complex and pressing issues of our time: identity, belonging, ownership and culture, often bringing fresh and startlingly new perspectives to familiar concerns. The result is a fascinating anthology in which home is both a place of origin and the place towards which we are always travelling, in the process celebrating our similarities and our differences both.