Plays & Poetry

These four richly evocative monologues were commissioned for Dublin's Culture Connects: The National Neighbourhood. In them, Dermot Bolger conjures up reimagined lives from the rich tapestry of Dublin life over the past century; stories that conspire to be humorous, mesmerising, shocking and deeply moving.

In the numbness of grief I felt certain I would never write poems again," Bolger claims in his prefatory note. But his readers will be glad that he has done so... (in)... what is ultimately a book of celebration...unflinching and sad - and beautiful.' - Times Literary Supplement

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.

'A collection suspended in a perpetual state of homecoming. Bolger navigates the worlds she inhabits with both the feverishness of a new rasika and the familiarity of an insider’. — Arundhathi Subramaniam

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.

Building the Ark is a single-poem volume by Pat Boran, with accompanying images. Part of the poet’s ongoing series of independent publications, it is published by Orange Crate Books on 12 January 2022 in a limited edition of 100 copies only, signed and numbered by the poet.

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.