20th Century Irish Poems

In a particularly turbulent century that witnessed, among other things, emigration, the 1916 uprising, world wars, the Troubles and the hunger strikes, the shifting perspectives of the poets, reporting on events in close-up or as noises-off, offer a unique commentary from the front line.

The editor of this collection of poems, Michael Longley, describes his work thus: "this anthology results from decades of random reading plus a deliberate trawl to discover more examples of what Robert Graves calls 'heart-rending sense' - poems I would want to copy our in longhand or hearn by heart or share with other in a book like this one". In a particularly turbulent century that witnessed, among other things, emigration, the 1916 uprising, world wars, the Troubles and the hunger strikes, the shifting perspectives of the poets, reporting on events in close-up or as noises-off, offer a unique commentary from the front line. Above all, what unites the poems is the imaginative relationship they hold with Ireland, and that they are written by poets who, as Longley puts it, "have been true to their experience, have forged individual idioms, who have transformed one or other of our old languages from within".