Plays & Poetry

Published to coincide with the 20th anniversary of global literacy non-profit, Room to Read, The Gifts of Reading forms inspiring, unforgettable, irresistible proof of the power and necessity of books and reading.

The follow-up to the internationally bestselling sensation The Lost Words, The Lost Spells is a beautiful collection of poems and illustrations that evokes the magic of the everyday natural world.

Noted novelist and essayist Tim MacGabhann's debut collection demonstrates a rare confidence and coherence, charting the course of addiction and recovery in a series of formally assured and blackly funny poems which bring us on a delirious but vividly captured journey from Ireland to Mexico.

Firth is a poetic portrait of the Firth of Forth. It reaches back into the deep geological past and forward into a troubled future of pollution and extinction, via the boom and bust of the nineteenthcentury fishing industry.

Part of the Open Door series of short books for emerging readers.

In this third collection, Mary Madec returns to the real world of what it means to be herself, a woman of these times, exploring again the territories of the heart. She presents a partly imagined trajectory, extending beyond the present and deep into the past, reaching into the experiences of silence and calling out the ‘voices.’ Her poems are compassionate and courageous, sensual and sometimes visceral meditations on the injured or ageing body, the broken heart, the reality of our ineluctably transient lives, and all the attendant grief. And yet there are light touches of redeeming humour, and always the Little White Egret of hope cancelling out the darkness. Her language is rich and precise, sensitive to how it must map the tangles of mind and heart in this poetic project, which asks the poet to tell us what it is we are made of, what it is that makes it possible for us to walk on this earth and be sufficient to ourselves.

Imelda Maguire never strays into the trap of nostalgia. She conjures up the past in a Proustian fashion, and achieves this by capturing the sights, smells and sounds associated with memories. I wholeheartedly commend this beautiful collection of 48 Fragments to you.

With its roots in the devotional verse of the early Christian church and the long lyric poems of the Irish bards, Irish poetry has a rich and robust tradition both of engagement and self-reflection.

Journeying is both earthy and transcending, with the poet aiming to open readers’ hearts and bring them inner tranquility through an artful marriage of word and image.