Forthcoming Titles – September 2025 are poetry by Kevin Graham, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and prose by Colm Tóibín.
Time’s Guest – Kevin Graham
Many of the poems in Time’s Guest, Kevin Graham’s second collection, find themselves outdoors — in woods, along the coast, down alleyways — by turns praising the natural world and mourning its evidential ruin. Time is the throughline and its paradox is uncompromising — ‘we shake the hand / of time and face an unbreakable fact’ (‘Walking Home Drunk from The 1975’).
Elsewhere, music and art inform jubilant lyrics that meditate on luminaries from J M Synge, Jack B Yeats and J M W Turner to The Frames, The War on Drugs and My Bloody Valentine. The central sequence ‘The Company of Trees’ plays with the language of ecology and literary history while ‘Easter 2024’ riffs on W B Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’ for the modern era. Rooted in the everyday and the otherworldly — both formal and free — these are poems that yearn for company and to be read and re-read.
Kevin Graham’s first collection, The Lookout Post, won the 2024 Southword Debut Poetry Collection Award.
New Selected Poems – Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
Among the remarkable characteristics of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry is its consistent excellence over nearly sixty years. Certain poems have entered the canon of Irish poetry. Her publishing career has been embellished with awards and honours at home and around the world. New Selected Poems represents generously each of her ten collections and culminates in a series of powerful new poems confirming that she is, simply, one of the finest poets at work today.
Ship in Full Sail: The Laureate Lectures and Other Writings – Colm Tóibín
In Ship in Full Sail Colm Tóibín’s ‘Laureate Lectures’ bookend thirty-four crystal clear essays, one written each month in the course of his tenure as Laureate of Irish Fiction. The myriad topics they embrace include Artificial Intelligence, reading Ulysses, the discomfort of Salman Rushdie in the wilds of County Dublin, Bob Dylan in concert, a life of Thom Gunn and the author’s role in a campaign to save the House of The Dead.
The lectures themselves ruminate on abiding interests — traditional Irish music and the visual arts. Ship in Full Sail — a veritable cornucopia — offers unmatched insights into the range of thinking and ways of working of one of Ireland’s belovèd writers.
