Penguin Book of Irish Poetry

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.

'This is the best available single-volume collection of Irish poetry yet published.', '...excellently edited, exceedingly confident, historically revealing and frequently surprising. The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry is a feat. It is the largest anthology of Irish verse yet spanning 1,500 years - and is more comprehensive than predecessors in its inclusion of a large quantity of pre-Yeats material and translations from languages other than Irish and Old English. A third of the 200+ translations are being published for the first time. It is, as Seamus Heaney says in the preface, the most confident anthology of the country's verse ... Patrick Crotty, the editor and a professor of Irish literature at Aberdeen University, should be congratulated for the precise, considerate and independent thinking he has brought to his selections.", This is a magnificent anthology...The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry is so rich in its inclusions, so superbly organised, showing such breadth of scholarship and (in general) felicity of judgement...applause for a great achievement..., 'The great length of the anthology allows brave decisions...the discrimination, imagination, deftness and heft of the whole is masterful. Much more than an anthology, this is an alternative history of Ireland, in poems that burn into the mind - the newly minted no less than the canonical.', Heaney occupies his rightful place in the year's stand-out anthology: The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry, edited by Patrick Crotty. From bards of the eighth century to Nick Laird (born in 1975), with ample space for translations from the Irish (over many centuries), for ballads and songs and rhymes, this sumptuous 1000-page gathering will last many winters out.

Patrick Crotty is a Professor of Scottish and Irish Literature at the University of Aberdeen and a regular reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement. His translations from seventeenth-, eighteenth- and twentieth-century Irish verse have appeared in many anthologies. He edited Modern Irish Poetry: An Anthology and is currently co-editing with Alan Riach the annotated three-volume Complete Collected Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid.Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry, Northern Ireland. Death of a Naturalist, his first book, appeared in 1966 and since then he has published poetry, criticism and translations which have established him as one of the most acclaimed writers of our time. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.