Plays & Poetry

An extensive series of poems which locate surviving local myths in Sliabh Luachra and beyond it in a long legendary history, starting with an imaginative extension of the familiar lore of the fate of the wren.

Features poems on nature and history, including the vanished world of the whaling industry.

In the newest edition to the Poet's Chair series, Frank Ormsby explores the structuring of his next collection The Tumbling Paddy. In it he extends the range of his most recent poems. He examines middle class life in Northern Ireland and his own experience as editor of a literary magazine and a number of anthologies during the Troubles.

Frank Ormsby's eighth collection of poems is a playful book which constantly surprises with serious themes. History is the word and history the image, whether in a dream about Auschwitz or a portrait of the History Club on its annual outing. Ormsby is by turn movingly elegiac and wryly determined in the face of mortality and Parkinson's disease.

The Buried Breath announces the arrival of a striking new voice and poetic talent. With formal ease and a sharply engaged sense of ethical inquiry, these lucid, lyrical poems delve into art and history, remembered lives and contemporary conflicts, for illumination and insight.

With lyric grace and meditative clarity, Phantom Gang offers a daring dissection of civilizational violence in a variety of contexts – from the intimate atavisms and inequalities of Irish history to the insidious growth of the global Big Tech economy in the present day – alongside deep, sensually delicate explorations of broken love and salvaged memories.

Re-issue of this 60s classic

Kate O’Shea is probably the best-known unknown poet in Dublin. She has published a chapbook, Crackpoet (Wurm Press, 2013). She was short-listed for the Patrick Kavanagh Award twice in two consecutive years, and also made the short-list for the Cork Literary Review Manuscript Competition, and Erbacce-Press in 2017. Her latest publications were in The Saranac Review, Orbis, and The Stinginng Fly.

An accomplished poet finds a fresh intensity and reach in this book. In four sequences, the poet tells of a life in love moving through the passionate erotic, the dramas of wooing, promising and quarrelling and the day-by-day of home. It culminates in the subtleties and variations of growing old while revelling in the love of life a deux.

In this new collection, Michael O'Siadhail measures how a life can be lived in the intensity of 'our double time', alert to its threats, ambiguities and frailties, seizing pivotal moments and tracing the intricacies of families and friendships.