Plays & Poetry

The Beauty Queen of Leenane tells the darkly comic tale of Maureen Folan, a plain and lonely woman in her early forties, and Mag her manipulative ageing mother whose interference in Maureen's first and potentially last loving relationship sets in motion a train of events that is as gothically funny as it is horrific.

"Mr McDonagh is destined to be one of the theatrical luminaries of the 21st century" (The New Republic)

The Russian masterpiece by Fyodor Dostoyevsky is adapted for the stage by Irish playwright Philip McDonagh. Stunningly illustrated, the book also includes a perceptive introduction by Mary McAleese, former president of Ireland.

This collection includes four early plays from the Irish Celtic renaissance written by a County Galway playwright, with three in the Irish language and one in English. A valuable biographical essay accompanies the plays.

There's no place like home, Terry McDonagh writes. And he concludes that home is enough. Home for McDonagh is Cill Aodain where he has returned after spending many years in Hamburg, also home for him. Two Notes for Home is a major collection from one of Ireland's finest contemporary poets.

This is the debut collection of poetry from leading Irish feminist activist Mamo McDonald. It reveals a warm, empathic voice in poems that engage in a candid, often humorous, way with everyday challenges of living and aging.

This seventh collection from Peter McDonald is a book of poems where fortune itself, which sets the terms for a life, becomes a lyrical music.

Lyrical and at times unsettling, The Somnambulist Cookbook explores the quality of disappearance, slowly breaking down as the poems swing from rogue sonnets to fractured prose poems, reminiscent of Larkin, but if he had gone abroad and listened to Pavement rather than jazz.

Poetry