"In his selection A. Norman Jeffares illustrates this variety, choosing love poems from every period of Irish history. Some of the poets will be well known to readers: Swift, Wilde and Kennelly as well as the Nobel Prize winners, Yeats, Beckett and Heaney. Others will be lesser known but their contribution provides an opportunity to hear the authentic and intensely passionate voice of Irish love poems across the ages."--BOOK JACKET.

Together these poems mingle the famous, the infamous, and the unknown into a beautiful and striking anthology. Fraught simultaneously with both violence and love, this work spans four centuries of romance, up-to and including the most modern of poets such as Sara Berkeley and 1995 Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney. It includes romantic favorites, passionate nationalists, Celtic heroes, and modern revivalists. For some of these authors, it is their first appearance in a U.S. anthology. This welcome collection captures the passion of being Irish and in love, be it the love of a woman or man, country or countryside, or the love of a freedom which seems perpetually elusive.

With its roots in the devotional verse of the early Christian church and the long lyric poems of the Irish bards, Irish poetry has a rich and robust tradition both of engagement and self-reflection. It has grappled long with politics and has provided the most eloquent response to Ireland's turbulent history, mediating and mitigating histories of loyalty and loss; it has soaked itself in the Irish landscape and Celtic myth; it has encompassed religion, so much a part of Ireland's cultural heritage. At the same time Irish poets have given their own original slant to everyday experience and affairs of the heart.Thematically organized and spanning many centuries, this selection also features a section of Gaelic poetry in translation, notably excerpts from the 18th-century epic masterpiece, Brian Merriman's The Midnight Court.

A rich and colourful celebration of the poetic heritage of Ireland, this CD and book anthology features classic and contemporary Irish poems read by 100 of the best-known voices in Irish life. A rich and colourful celebration of the poetic heritage of Ireland, this CD and book anthology features classic and contemporary Irish poems read by 100 of the best-known voices in Irish life, including Maeve Binchy, Bono, Pierce Brosnan, The Corrs, Bertie Ahern, Bob Geldof, Seamus Heaney, Marian Keyes and Sinead O'Connor. Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol alongside new work from Ireland's finest living writers. As well as forming a living testament to the best of Irish writing, the collection is also a reminder that words, both oral and written, do make a difference with all royalties going to Focus Ireland, the country's largest and most respected charity for the homeless.

The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry features the work of the greatest Irish poets, from the monks of the ancient monasteries to the Nobel laureates W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney, from Jonathan Swift and Oliver Goldsmith to Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, along with a profusion of lyrics, love poems, satires, ballads and songs. Reflecting Ireland's complex past and lively present, this collection of Irish verse is an indispensable guide to the history, culture and romance of one of Europe's oldest civilizations. In his introduction to this new Penguin Classics edition, Patrick Crotty explores the traditions of poetry in Ireland, and relates the rich variety of the poems to the long and frequently troubled history of the island.

Hear the poetry of Yeats, Heaney, Muldoon and more, read by Bono, Colin Farrell, Pierce Brosnan and more.