Irish Poetry Titles

Published 2009. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848610262 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Forest Music is Susan Connolly's second full-length collection. Many poems in the book depict the author's personal encounter with her landscape. Living in Drogheda, close to the Boyne Valley, her poems celebrate the famous archaeological monuments of Knowth, Dowth and Newgrange alongside local landmarks: the Maiden Tower, the seawall at Baltray and the discovery in a back garden of a cobbled garden dating from the early nineteenth century.

        Her recent work is more experimental in form. These poems involve a typography in which the visual pattern corresponds in some way to the sense of the word or phrase represented. Dissatisfied with words always moving from left to right across the page, in these poems words can be vertical instead of horizontal, and move in circles and spirals as the need dictates.

Published 2013. Chapbook, 34pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848613133 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

The Sun-Artist is a collection of "pattern poems" by a poet who has been experimenting with visual texts—often with a uniquely Irish "subject matter"—for several years. Her last Shearsman collection, Forest Music, featured a number of such works, but this chapbook is entirely visual.

Published 2017. Paperback, 30pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848615601 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Francis Ledwidge was a frequent visitor to the McGoona household at Donaghmore, near Navan, Co. Meath. Matty McGoona, an amateur naturalist and musician, became his close friend. A chance encounter with an elderly man beside the orchard at Donaghmore was the catalyst which led Susan Connolly to explore the life of Francis Ledwidge in greater depth, and to write her sequence of poems, The Orchard Keeper . Francis Ledwidge was born in Slane, Co. Meath, in 1887. He wrote poetry from an early age. He enlisted in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers in 1914, and survived the battlefields of Gallipoli, Serbia and Arras before being killed on July 31st, 1917, the first day of the Third Battle of Ypres.

     The six poems gathered under the title Woman in a Black Hat , warmly recall the lives of close friends and family.

Published 2025. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619593

". . . there is that second strand, the fitful, halting strand of Irish modernism, a bare technique, picked up by Beckett and carried through by writers such as . . . neo-Classicist poet, Fergal Gaynor. James Joyce would have recognised these contemporary writers instantly, knowing that their modernist efforts to escape from the story-teller material of Ireland should lead to new forms . . ."  (Thomas McCarthy, Irish Examiner)

Published 2025. Paperback, 78pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619852

In this notable debut collection, Christina Hennemann charts the complex terrain of growing up, becoming, and belonging. Her keen ecological awareness infuses the work with vivid landscapes from both her German roots and Irish home. With unflinching honesty and lyrical precision, she explores the intersections of gender, class, and sexuality against the backdrop of intergenerational trauma. She weaves personal history with ancient mythologies and archetypes into poems with a vatic and haunting nature. Characteristic of her poems is her playful approach to bilingualism, while her feminist-psychoanalytic lens brings sharp focus to the personal and political dimensions of growing up in a dysfunctional family amid global upheaval.

Shearsman Library Vol. 20. Second edition. First UK edition.
Published 2025. Paperback, 328pp, 9 x 6ins, £19.95 / $32

ISBN 9781848619692

What's in Store, first published in Canada in 2008, was Trevor Joyce's first full-length book following the publication of his collected poems, with the first dream of the fire they hunt the cold (Shearsman Books, 2001; 2nd edition 2003). For this volume, the author shaped eight years' worth of work — individual poems, extended sequences, translations from the Irish, Chinese, and other languages — into a continuous book-length structure. These poems find Joyce reaching out towards a jarringly wide range of styles and voices, from the tart lyricism of his re-workings of European folksongs to the ferociously dense collage/inscription of "STILLSMAN." Brought together as a book, the poems take on further meanings: What's in Store is at once a Borgesian guide to the history, customs and scientific discourse of an unknown country, and an Oulipian textual machine, whose workings by turns terrify and exalt.

Chapbook, £7.50.

Five Easy Pieces provides a very accessible opening into Mills' work, with all of his main themes and devices present: the found text, the expressive use of space on the page, the landscape as source and record, the personal lyric… (Randolph Healy, Orbis ). 

This book has since been reprinted in the author's Collected (see below).

Published 2009. Paperback, 360pp, 9x6ins, £17.95 / $25

ISBN 9781848610460 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Billy Mills was born in Dublin in 1954. After spending some time in Spain and the UK, he now lives and works in the mid-west of Ireland. This collection brings together his seven previously published volumes, which have been revised and corrected, plus a selection of newer, previously uncollected work.

Published 2024. Paperback, 96pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619289

In the Postface to his 114 Songs of 1922, Charles Ives wrote: “Some of the songs in this book, particularly among the latter ones, cannot be sung, and if they could, perhaps might prefer, if they had a say, to remain as they are; that is, ‘in the leaf’ and that they will remain in this peaceful state is more than presumable.” Oddly enough, some of the songs in this book have been sung, but most remain silent on the page awaiting a willing reader who’s ready to take the title at face value. These are songs in which “nothing happens/& it is good” if you want it to be. —Billy Mills 

Published 2009. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848610590 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Humming is Maurice Scully's first full-length book of new work since the Things That Happen project (1981–2006). Dedicated to the poet's late brother, it places human life in the larger frame of history and pre-history, of a world in drifts of pollen, and other life possibilities over large stretches of time in which the poetry can score its pollen-like trace knowing

           "how to wait 

                             what to expect" what to expect"

Published 2006. 102pp, paperback 8.5x5.5ins. £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9780907562962 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Maurice Scully is one of Ireland's most original poets, and most unusual. All of his work over the past 25 years has been part of one enormous project, under the umbrella title Things That Happen , which is completed with the appearance of this volume, the final section of the whole work, and Sonata (the penultimate section, also published in 2006 by Reality Street Editions). A criss-crossing of languages and cultures, and the point at which the personal life of the author intersects with the public domain, Tig is an absorbing book in its own right, as well as being the summation of one of the most interesting projects in recent Irish writing.

Published 2019. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848616530 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Maldon is a version of the Anglo-Saxon epic fragment usually known as The Battle of Maldon , which tells the tale of a battle between the Anglo-Saxons and the invading Vikings which took place ca. 991 AD on the shores of the River Blackwater, almost certainly opposite Northey Island. This was originally published in 2004 as part of the now-deleted volume, Maldon & Other Translations .

"Smith’s version [of Maldon ] preserves nicely a ghost of the alliterative pattern that rumbles through the original, without trying to reproduce it fully in a clog-dance of consonants. It is recognisably the same poem as the original: it has its linguistic density and compelling narrative pull, but it is free from the mildewed quaintness that sometimes hangs around translation from Old English.” —Dr. Alex Davis, U.C. Cork

Published 2014. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848613379 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



This is Michael Smith's first collection since his Collected Poems of 2009, and is an elegiac volume. As the author says: "Let me try to define prayer as I am using it here. It is a voice in the head, ours and not ours. It speaks in words we scarcely understand. Unstoppable, unless distracted by our quotidian pursuits. Beckett said it thus: 'All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody is prayer.' Enigmatic, but what else would one expect from Beckett? Essentially, I perceive prayer as a form of homage or 'recognition'—the other word used by Beckett."

Published 2011. Paperback, 106pp, 9x6ins. OUT OF PRINT.

ISBN 9781848611344 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

A companion volume to Michael Smith's Maldon & Other Translations (2004), this volume collects his translations from Greek, Latin, Irish and Andalusian Arabic, the latter poems being co-translated with Luis Ingelmo.

Published 2004. Paperback 9x6ins, 154pp.

ISBN 9780907562603. OUT OF PRINT

N.B. This volume has been superseded by Cantes flamencos  and the chapbook Maldon — A Version (see  above, and also in the Translations catalogue under Smith ).

Maldon contains translations from the Anglo-Saxon ( The Battle of Maldon ), the 18th-century Irish ( The Death of Art O'Leary and Sean O'Dwyer of the Glen ) and a large selection of cantes flamencos (flamenco songs) translated from an Andalusian dialect of Spanish. Although better-known in the UK for his translations of the baroque poets Góngora and Quevedo, Michael Smith has also translated the works of Rosalía de Castro, Neruda, Lorca and Miguel Hernández.

Published 2009. Paperback, 132pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848610798 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Optic Verve is the latest long poem by Catherine Walsh, perhaps Ireland's most radical experimental woman poet.

"It seems a shame that many Irish poetry readers are unaware of Catherine Walsh's very obvious gifts. Her brilliant punning, the way she assembles disjointed, yet perfectly rendered fragments of Dublin argot and her ability to imply simultaneous narratives mark her out from her contemporaries." —Dónal Moriarty: The Art of Brian Coffey

Published 2005. 84pp. Paperback, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9780907562542 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Irish poet Catherine Walsh is noted for her long poems in experimental forms, and City West , completed in 2000, is her most recent such work, following Pitch (Pig Press, 1994) and Idir Eatortha (Invisible Books, 1996). Previously City West was only available in an Irish small-press edition, with a tiny print-run.