Plays & Poetry International

Every night during a year spent in lockdown, Dermot Bolger set out on long walks through deserted streets, armed only with a pen and paper. Bolger follows in the footsteps of the great Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa, using walks through his native city to allow his imagination free rein to revisit pivotal moments in his own life and speculatively meditate on the lives of others in a series of remarkable poems.

In his eighty-eighth year, John Boorman CBE uses his time in lockdown to reflect on the splendour of the surrounding nature of County Wicklow. Poetry flows from his pen as he sits chairbound among his trees and flora: sycamores, beech, oak, redwood, shrubs and flowers, birdsong and shifting skies are luminously recorded as the world falls silent.

This collection radiates beauty, honesty, and an authentic poetic voice that seems to overturn everything ugly in human experience. Tender portraits of family roots accompany a kaleidoscopic Strabane and touch on the anxiety of growing up in fraught political times.

Cnuasach Filíochta le Julie Breathnach-Banwait. A collection of poetry by Julie Breathnach-Banwait.

Poetry collection by Julie Breathnach-Banwait.

Author Jan Brierton (based in Artane in Dublin), fashion stylist by trade, began writing out of frustration at her work drying up, and the need to juggle being a home-school teacher, playground chaperone, cook, cleaner and everything else, and the desire to be back with the people she loved. She ended up writing a poem the book takes its name from, which was championed by her friend Roisín Ingle in the Irish Times and went ‘viral’.

A beautiful collection of poems from the powerfully talented and much-loved Bronte sisters. 'Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel' Charlotte Bronte

New and selected poems from Dr Arthur Broomfield