Plays & Poetry Irish

These powerful and evocative poem that captures moments of introspection and a sense of place.

Includes poems from a mapless journey through the backwaters of Europe and the New World - imbued, as always, with the strange, unerring logic of dream, but carrying now a new, fugitive, lyrical note.

Poems and thoughts inspired by Glendalough and the Wicklow Hills

J M Synge was one of the key dramatists in the flourishing world of Irish literature at the turn of the century. This volume offers all of Synge's plays, which range from racy comedy to stark tragedy, all sharing a memorable lyricism. The introduction sets Synge's work in the context of the Irish literary movement, with special attention to his role as one of the founders of the Abbey Theatre and his work alongside W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory. Includes: Riders to the Sea; The Shadow of the Glen; The Tinker's Wedding; The Well of the Saints; The Play of the Western World; Deirdre of the Sorrows

A murderer becomes the toast of the village as his charm negates his crime. A young countess saves her tenants from starvation, but only by selling her soul to the Devil. The sleepy parish of Nyadnanave sees a vision of a cockerel that dares the inhabitants to break the shackles of Church and State.

Synge's masterpiece about a father, a son, a woman in love and a tragedy.

George Szirtes fled from Budapest with his family after the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Many of these poems relate to his arrival in England as a young child, and to the themes of identity, memory, belonging, war, and upheaval, with a sequence on living now in a country under siege from coronavirus.

In this debut collection from a poet whose reverence for nature is a constant and comforting aesthetic, the poems explore themes of innocence and experience. From the intimacy of personal loss to war and its cruel consequences, these poems are always surprising, always true.