Twelve Poetry Books of Christmas 2025

The River Crana – Frank McGuinness
‘My father’s father took his chance/on the first flight over Lisfannon.’ So begins a poem in Frank McGuinness’s eighth collection, The River Crana, a book equally at home in Donegal as Japan and ancient Illyria. His poems have been praised by Seán Hewitt in The Irish Times for their ‘dark contours and gothic atmosphere, their sensory detail and sly humour’ — traits clear in this new book in which ‘Buncrana, Christmas Eve’ is vividly evocative of the author’s home town in his childhood.

Chic to be Sad – Molly Twomey
Framed between work that centres on a fire in her family home this book displays an even wider range than her debut, Raised Among Vultures. The poems never shy from physical and emotional vulnerability.
Brave in its honesty and directness, Chic to be Sad confirms a special gift and presence in Irish poetry before reaching its wise conclusion: ‘There is so much to know, / so much I want you to hear.’

Fallen – Audrey Molloy
From the opening line of Fallen there is a sense of danger and intimacy. In her latest and most risqué collection Audrey Molloy asks: What makes a good person? What does it mean to be a fallen woman? And can she ever redeem herself?

New Selected Poems – Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
Among the remarkable characteristics of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry is its consistent excellence over nearly sixty years. 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.

The Convent of Mercy – Tom French
Tom French has steadily built a distinct, consistent and coherent body of work. His clear lyrics and narrative poems display a virtuosity of sentence and stanza. Poems embrace domestic and historic subject matter and touch on contemporary global unrest. His ‘The Road from Schiphol’, a harrowing account of a pilgrimage to the site of a family  tragedy, is a new kind of achievement.

States – Ciaran Berry
In States, his fourth collection, Ciaran Berry offers poems that are attentive to the cinema of the moment and the film that becomes the life. High-stepping between giddiness and gravity, in long lines that work to bridge the gap between now and then, and here and there, these poems consider what it means to live on this fraught planet as it spins anti-clockwise at roughly a thousand miles per hour, and where it seems, now more than ever, as if the funfair has ended and the disaster movie has just begun.

The Coast Road – Ailbhe NÍ Ghearbhuigh (paperback only)
Bilingual with translations from thirteen writers. From named places to imagined states, including ‘the madhouse behind the moon’, The Coast Road is a book of uncommon range and searing effect. Some of Ireland’s finest poets gather to spread the word and introduce a vital voice to a wider audience.

Time’s Guest – Kevin Graham
Many of the poems in 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. 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.

Custom of the Coast – Paul Muldoon (hardback only)
In Paul Muldoon’s typically inventive drama for two voices one strand recounts the adventures of Anne Bonny, an eighteenth-century pirate from County Cork who roamed the Caribbean until, after being apprehended, her death sentence was commuted because she ‘pleaded the belly’.
A parallel strand reports the shameful case in which the lost pregnancy of an Indian dentist in Galway, Savita Halappanavar, became her death sentence because the law in Catholic Ireland of that time forbade a termination to save the mother’s life.

Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture – Seamus Heaney (paperback only)
The Nobel Lecture — Crediting Poetry is the first publication of the lecture he delivered at the Swedish Academy on 7 December 1995. Seamus Heaney received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 ‘for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt the every day miracles and the living past’. Crediting Poetry – Seamus Heaney
This December is the 30th anniversary of Seamus Heaney receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Over Here – Alan Gillis
Over Here plunges us into the middle of things. The book’s elegiac sweep, as Alan Gillis extends the tonal depth and lyric resonance of his work, is combined with dark humour, imaginative flights, rants, raves, and daring provocations. Spanning past and present, parenthood and childhood, what is here and what is gone, set-pieces and shorter lyrics range widely, yet keep returning to what is at the core of experience.

American Anthem – Kelly Michels
Blending lyric and narrative modes the dominant strands of American Anthem focus on the tragedies, both personal and national, of the opioid epidemic and its devastating effects of addiction and of gun violence in America where the author grew up. This is an urgent, necessary book, a severe indictment of the mammoth pharmaceutical companies and of the merchants and proponents of arms.
American Anthem proclaims a new voice in Irish poetry. It is an outstanding, bold and brave first collection.