When does a poem tell the truth? When is it a lie? Intimate moments carefully re-appraised (first dates, break ups, young parenthood, etc.) are the raw material of these vivid and wholly engaging poems, written in Irish, and translated here by the author - a process that itself raises questions about poetry and truth.

But a great deal of the power of N Ghr ofa's work comes from the way her personal history links her to the wider world - to the imaginative encounters that prompt so many of the poems, to an acute awareness of the restless nature of language itself, and not least to the women who preceded her and who remain a steadying and guiding presence throughout.

This major bilingual anthology, with English translations by Richard Zenith and Alexis Levitin, introduces the work of 28 Portuguese poets (beginning with Fernando Pessoa and his 'heteronyms'), and reveals a richly varied body of verse that is at once a place of departure and exploration as well as, in the words of Alexandre O'Neill's 'Portugal', an ongoing discussion with myself

Poets included: Alberto CAEIRO - Ricardo REIS - lvaro de CAMPOS - Fernando PESSOA - Florbela ESPANCA - Jorge de SENA - Sophia de Mello BREYNER - Carlos de OLIVIERA - Eug nio de ANDRADE - M rio CESARINY - Alexandre O'NEILL - Ant nio Ramos ROSA - Herberto HELDER - Ruy BELO - Fiama Hasse Pais BRAND O - Luiza Neto JORGE - Vasco Gra a MOURA - Ant nio Franco ALEXANDRE - Al BERTO - Nuno J DICE - Ana Lu sa AMARAL - Ad lia LOPES - Paulo TEIXEIRA - Jos Tolentino MENDON A - Lu s QUINTAIS - Daniel FARIA - Margarida Vale de GATO - Daniel JONAS

The Dedalus Press series of budget pamphlets presents works by major voices in world poetry. Inger Christensen (1935 - 2009) was one of Denmark's best-known poets and was widely celebrated throughout Europe and the United States. She wrote several volumes of poetry as well as novels, plays, children's books and essays, winning many major European prizes and awards, including the prestigious Nordic Prize in 1994. Butterfly Valley is a tour de force, exploring the major themes of life, love, death and art. The form is simple yet complex, a sequence of fifteen sonnets building to a final sonnet of extraordinary power composed of lines taken from the preceding fourteen sonnets in the sequence. Life, love, art, all are transient - like the butterfly - yet beautiful, even in their ephemerality. The translator Susanna Nied is a former insructor of English and comparative literature at San Diego State University in California. Her translation of Inger Christensen's alphabet won the 1982 ASF/PEN Translation Prize.

This major bilingual anthology, with English translations by Richard Zenith and Alexis Levitin, introduces the work of 28 Portuguese poets (beginning with Fernando Pessoa and his 'heteronyms'), and reveals a richly varied body of verse that is at once a place of departure and exploration as well as, in the words of Alexandre O'Neill's 'Portugal', an ongoing discussion with myself

In Into the Night that Flies So Fast, the debut collection of poems from Belfast-based Milena Williamson, the speaker journeys to the small County Tipperary village of Ballyvadlea, to investigate the life and death of Bridget Cleary, in 1895 burned to death by her family on suspicion of being a fairy changeling.

Fusing docupoetry and true crime, travelogue and drama, the book introduces a compelling cast of characters as the ill-fated Bridget, her family and members of her community all come onstage to give their versions of events. In the 'Interval' of this play for voices, the speaker herself draws back from Bridget's story to reflect on her own new life in Ireland, on the relationships and journey that have brought her to this interrogation of one of the darkest episodes in Ireland's past.

In this shape-shifting narrative, not only do we meet Bridget Cleary, the woman inside the poet's head, but we are also given a startling glimpse of how aspects of Cleary's story reverberate into today; of other voices that will always be an absence. A brilliant debut. -Moyra Donaldson

A lyrical gymnast, Williamson's work soars in even the most dangerous spaces. Though she delves into humanity's darkest side, Williamson's poetry is also dexterous, playful, and full of compassion in this formally ambitious and expansive collection.- Rosamund Taylor

Things being so urgent, when you

open a book its leaves should take you

back to the forest they came from ...

('Vestige')

So opens the first poem in Grace Wells' The Church of the Love of the World, a book that begs us to only connect as it explores our individual roles - and the role of poetry itself - in these troubling times.

At once sure-footed and curious, optimistic and on the brink of despair, as well as stand-out lyric moments, the book features a number of longer poems and sequences, among them the extraordinary 'She Gathers the Wild Grasses' which explores our very real dependence on grasses, the evolution of society itself made possible by their contribution. As elsewhere, memory, myth, anecdote and hands-on experience are all woven together to produce, among other things,my own dough - // something forever illiterate / and welcome / in signing each crust with my mark.

The Church of the Love of the World is a powerful and passionate new book, confirming the promise of Wells' previous collection, Fur, described in Poetry Ireland Review as work that enlarges the possibilities of poetry.

Do our passions control us or us them? These poems find themselves asking such questions in hospitals, in cellars, in Parisian parks and American laundromats, inside our screens and beyond them. Poems of blood and birdsong, of rain and desire, of aftermath and ambivalence, each spoken by a voice, which - like the starlings - sings, at once, both past and present.

Looking into the dark sky of history, Doireann N Ghr ofa calls up an illuminating fire, a night constellated into images of passion and destruction. An astrologer of the body, its endurance and its vulnerability, N Ghr ofa is a poet of daring skill. Lyrical, searching and enchanted, To Star the Dark is a blazing, brave collection. - Se n Hewitt

Like Eavan] Boland, N Ghr ofa constructs a mysterious world for her readers from the matter of ordinary life. The poems of this collection impress upon us that magic and depth can be found in the minutiae of the everyday. - Poetry Ireland Review, on Lies

In his fourth collection of poems, poet & physicist Iggy McGovern lets art and science intermingle in poems that range from the domestic to the ekphrastic, from the celebratory to the elaboratory. With trademark formality he runs his eye over an array of themes, some familiar, some less so, allowing for both conversation and collision: an epistolary paean to fellow Ulsterman Seamus Heaney borrows a Latin quotation from a letter by Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton to William Wordsworth; the early history of the quantum revolution is mapped out in clerihew form; and Schrödinger's cat takes up the position of tour guide in the famous box. The poet's failure to write a real love poem and a childhood memory of near-accidental loss of eyesight are both, somehow, science's fault. And through it all the eyes have it, narrowing, winking, weeping and (given the right conditions) dilating into Black Holes.

Hedge School is Irish poet Pat Boran's 8th collection of poems, finding inspiration and consolation in the local and near-at-hand, in the examples of our neighbours (human and creaturely), in the roots and shoots of what turns out to be a vibrant global network. Against a backdrop of climate concern and increasing international unrest, Hedge School responds to the subjects of home and homelessness, belonging and welcome, knowledge and discovery, putting its faith in connection and communication, and trusting in small but robust forms to stand against the chill winds of our troubled and troubling times.

A writer of great tenderness and lyricism - Agenda, UK

... local and international, personal and scientific, full of wisdom and wry humor ... - Irish Literary Supplement, USA

Beginnings Over and Over: Four New Poets from Ireland presents a significant selection of work by four new poets at the beginning of their writing journeys.

Selected by Leeanne Quinn from the submissions for the 2024 Dedalus Press Mentoring Scheme, the four poets - Mai Ishikawa, Róisín Leggett Bohan, Emer Lyons and Cal O'Reilly are, in Quinn's words, writers who are willing to risk, willing to discover, willing to alter and undermine.

Dedalus Press is proud to present the first in a series of mini anthologies, to stand with these emerging voices as they bring their attentions to bear on the world and enrich the conversation that is new writing from Ireland.

Of Ochre and Ash, Eleanor Hooker's third collection of poems, lends to her familiar themes of family, place and memory a trademark uncanny, even otherworldly atmosphere, in which the glimpsed, the intuited and the half-known provide a great deal of the interest.The desire to see my home from the other side is a constant, but so too is immersion in the moment and, indeed, the ever-present nearby darkening lake.

Eleanor Hooker's voice guides her reader through large metaphoric visions and the consolations of ordinary life. This is a collection full of urgent, haunted poems with a subtle range of approach; they are many-faceted works, reflecting the fragmented strangeness of experience. We face wild gothic moments, whose counterweight is the familiar, calm or stormy, world of the lake she lives beside and the people whose life is shared with hers.

- Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

Eleanor Hooker's poetry has a way of resonating in the reader like secret histories passed down through the generations. It is a strange effect: the drift of these poems seems to have been with us even before we began reading and lingers long after the book is closed. They are both strangely familiar and incredibly new and run the gamut of human experience: poems of sickness and healing; journeys and journeying, poems of the dead and the unborn; of storm and calm. The world she describes for us is by turns unsettling, mythic and surreal, but ultimately so exquisite and affirming that it can only be our own.

- John Glenday

Compiled around 1235, the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, or Ogura's 100 Poems by 100 Poets, is one of the most important collections of poetry in Japan. Though the poets include emperors and empresses, courtiers and high priests, ladies-in-waiting and soldier-calligraphers, the collection is far more than a fascinating historical document. As the translators of this new edition note in their Introduction, these beautiful poems have endured because their themes are universal and readily understood by contemporary readers.

The poems in Irish poet Patrick Deeley's latest collection Keepsake arrive as bounties from nature. They sing to experiences of love, friendship, art, childhood and ageing. Moving from the wetland meadows of the west of Ireland to the rugged surrounds of the River Dodder in Dublin, and further afield to Europe and beyond, they delight in catching the heightened, close to hallucinatory effects of time spent in the presence of wild and wilding, while yet communicating a punchy and palpable sense of the modern world - and ourselves with it - as being charmed, chaotic, and fleeting.

The shadow of annihilation hovers. Indeed, certain poems present the earth as post-apocalyptic yet somehow continuing, while others posit the idea and consequence of the narrator surviving in a 'ghost life' after his own death. All the poems show fidelity to - and echo the wonder of - our existence, what Philip Larkin calls 'the million-petalled flower of being here'. Ultimately they bear testament to the dream nature of everything, the gift of this once and once only world that animates us.

This Groundswell: New and Selected is a reminder, to those who need it, that here is a true poet whose work will survive as a crowning privilege in our generation.-Thomas McCarthy, Trumpet (Poetry Ireland)

Fascinated by the empirical evidence, he displays a questing, questioning spirit before nature and the universe with a natural sense of awe before the mysteries.- Patrick Kehoe, RTÉ Culture

In Writing Home: The 'New Irish' Poets, more than 50 poets from all over the world explore the many meanings and connotations of the word 'home'. Hailing from places as diverse as India and Italy, Poland and Pakistan, Canada and the Democratic Republic of the Congo - as well as the US, the UK and Ireland itself - together they present an updated picture of a changing country while, at the same time, expanding the very definition of 'writing from Ireland'.

The poems gathered here are as various and lively as we might hope for. Some contributors might be said to 'write home' in the traditional sense, describing and explaining what they find in the place they now live; for others 'writing home' is a determined, creative act of self-definition.

For all of them there is the real sense that writing is itself a kind of home-building, not least at a time when so many borders, physical and psychological, are under threat of closure across the world.

Echoes and hauntings, visions and visitations, glimpses of other worlds in the margins of this ... the second collection of poems by Jessica Traynor begins with a brush with death and goes on to explore a startling variety of connections with life and the matter of living. Throughout, from the loss of loved ones to the arrival of a firstborn no bigger / than a loaf of bread, the poems stay faithful to a busy cast of characters which includes strangers encountered on a moonlit quay, the infamous propagandist Lord Haw-Haw, and the restless spirits of recent family, national and international history.

Mysteries of the Home gathers into a single volume a selection of poems from Paula Meehan's two seminal mid-career collections, The Man who was Marked by Winter (1991) and Pillow Talk (1994), both of which won considerable praise from critics and readers alike. Included here are some of her best-known and best-loved poems - 'The Pattern', 'The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks', 'My Father Perceived as a Vision of St Francis' and 'The Wounded Child' among them. They show an artist at the height of her powers producing work of remarkable candour and ... stunning lyricism (The Colby Quarterly). Paula Meehan was born in 1955 in Dublin where she still lives. Besides six collections of poems, the most recent of which are Dharmakaya (2000) and Painting Rain (2009), she has also written plays for both adults and children and conducted residencies in universities, in prisons and in the wider community. Paula Meehan is a member of Aosd na and the recipient of a number of awards, including the Marten Toonder Award for Literature in 1995 and the Denis Devlin Memorial Award in 2001.

Paul Murray's third and fourth collections of poems, The Absent Fountain (1992) and These Black Stars (2003) are still much sought after and admired: the precision and economy of the language is exemplary, --- its concentrated focus well suited for the task in hand. Murray's is a mystical journey, informed by the vocabulary and symbols of the spiritual quest, and he regularly engages the reader - and indeed God - in dialogue, drawing us into an exploration of memory and desire, of dream, darkness and rebirth. The closing poem, paradoxically entitled Beginning, at once celebrates and challenges: I have come through / after all. I have a new / dawn on my shoulders. The Absent Fountain is the product of a passionate and sometimes playful mind, which teases out paradoxes, making the absent seem palpably present and the material seem ultimately immaterial. It is, in every sense, an inspired work. - Dennis O'Driscoll, Doctrine & Life Paul Murray was born in Newcastle, Co. Down, Northern Ireland in 1947. He entered the Dominican Order in 1966 and currently lives in Rome where he teaches the literature of the mystical tradition at the Angelicum University.

News that the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature had been awarded to the Swedish poet Tomas Transtr mer was greeted with widespread approval by poets and poetry readers the world over. The author of fifteen collections of poems, Transtr mer had in fact been nominated for the prize every year since 1993, a sign of his huge standing and importance in world poetry, undiminished in recent years despite a stroke in 1990 that left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak. The Nobel citation praised Transtr mer's poems of condensed, translucent images which give us fresh access to reality, and that startling originality is everywhere to be seen in the poems gathered here, first published as two separate volumes by the Dedalus Press, The Wild Marketplace (1985) and For the Living and the Dead (1994), both translated by John F. Deane, the latter in collaboration with the poet himself.

MATTHEW GEDEN was born in England and in 1990 moved to Kinsale where he runs a bookshop in the town. He co-founded the SoundEye International Poetry Festival which takes place in Cork. His own poems have appeared in several publications in Ireland and abroad, among them the poetry anthology for younger readers Something Beginning with P, Poets of the Millennium, The Backyards of Heaven and Landing Places: Immigrant Poets in Ireland (Dedalus Press, 2009). Matthew Geden's second collection of poems explores questions of belonging and displacement, travel and the challenges of maintaining meaningful connection in an ever-changing world. In 'Time Passes', after Pierre Reverdy, he writes He never found any shelter other than space, and many of the poems echo this sense of being on the edge, halfway out / the door. The poems are liable to zoom out to a cool objective view, informed by historical insight, but they also chart intimate relationships and love which have the power to alter not just the poet's view but perhaps even the world itself: the mountains blush / under the glint / in your eye. The poem 'Limbo' records one of the many hauntings to which the self is vulnerable, the presence and pull of the past, concluding: I can't go back, return to the house / where I was born, the spinney / in which I lived. I would see / myself in the hallway, outside / the living-room door, listening for news / of the adult world, my childhood in limbo.

DEDALUS PRESS is one of the longest-established and most energetic small presses in Ireland, and one of the most outward-looking in Ireland and the UK, according to UNESCO.org. Supplementing our many new individual publications, our New Writers series aims to introduce a small number of emerging writers, offering a more extensive selection of their work than might easily be accommodated in a literary journal or magazine. In doing so, we hope both to encourage new talent and to whet the appetites of the many admirers of new writing from Ireland, at home and abroad. The poets included in this first volume are Marie Coveney, Clare McCotter and John Saunders.