Written between August and December 1938, this poem is a record of MacNeice's emotional and intellectual experience during those months. The trivia of everyday living is set against events in the world outside - the settlement in Munich and slow defeat in Spain.

"This powerful new perspective on MacNeices life and work explores his poetry, prose and drama as part of a biographical re-evaluation. Christopher Fauske places the poets relationship with Ireland, the Second World War, his father and the key women in his life at its centre, unravelling unprecedented considerations that challenge the critical foundations of this luminary of Irish writing."--Publisher's description.

The author of Blitz and the Jack Taylor novels delivers a “fast-paced, tough and explosive” tale of a killer couple (The Irish Times). Cooper likes Ed McBain novels, action movies, and robbing banks. Released from prison, he’s back on the outside, and in business with another former con. They call themselves “Righteous Repo.” It’s so legit they even have an accountant. It’s decent work, but not as lucrative as the bank jobs they still pull on the side. Not as stimulating, either. But nothing gets Cooper’s blood pumping faster than Cassie—an easy, all-American beauty with a bent for metaphysics, Irish poets, and taking risks. Cassie’s also a professional shoplifter, slumming at a low-end South London shop when Cooper first lays eyes on her. After a single hookup comes the catch: Now that Cooper’s had her, he’s not allowed to touch another woman. He thinks she’s quite a joker until he wakes up and finds Cassie’s note. She drugged him, stole his pistol and his cash, and left him with another warning: She’s not through with him. Not by a long shot. Only death will keep her away, so death it must be. Cooper and Cassie are made for each other. From the award-winning author of the Jack Taylor novels, Her Last Call to Louis MacNeice delivers “pulp with an A level” (The Guardian), once again confirming Bruen as “the crime novelist to read” (George Pelacanos).

Long thought to be merely part of the Auden generation, and often viewed as an English poet, Louis MacNeice became important to the postwar generation of Irish poets, especially those from Northern Ireland like Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon, because of his lyrically nuanced considerations of international as well as national issues. Born and raised in Northern Ireland, and educated in England where he resided for much of his adult life, MacNeice answered a need in these poets for a perspective that made the local have larger political significance. He also offered an angry critique of Ireland and Irish history that was tempered by familial love and affection. Michael Longley's selection of poems highlights why the critique and the perspective that MacNeice provided were important to his generation as well as to those that have followed. It also shows us that Louis MacNeice's mixed allegiance between Ireland and England, his urbanity, his postmodern pluralism, and his belief that the personal is political, make him a poet for our day.

Louis MacNeice is increasingly recognised as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, and his work has been a defining influence upon a generation of Irish poets that includes Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon. The Selected Letters is indispensable as a resource for an understanding of the intellectual culture of the mid-twentieth century. A Classics don, poet, playwright and globetrotting BBC producer, the medley and blend of MacNeice's cultural influences seems exemplary in its modernity. He kept up a significant correspondence with E. R. Dodds, Anthony Blunt and T. S. Eliot, to name but three prominent figures of the time. During his time at the BBC MacNeice witnessed many key events, including the partition of India in 1947 and the independence of the Gold Coast from Britain in 1957, and these are recorded in two long sequences to his wife, the singer Hedli Anderson. His complex relationship to Ireland and to his Irish heritages speak resonantly to contemporary debates about Irish and Northern Irish cultural identity. Finally, the Letters will do much to broaden our understanding of a vivid and often enigmatic personality whose varied life and individual charisma have often resisted explanation.

When Auden and MacNeice travelled in Iceland together in 1936, the verse, prose, letters and notes they recorded would appear the following year as 'Letters from Iceland'.