Anthologies and bibliography

The essential anthologies, key collections and the major translations.

ISBNs are given where they have been confirmed from a publisher or a bibliographic authority. They are never reconstructed, so where none appears, none has been established.

Confirmed so far: Queering the Green (9781916222830) and Green Carnations (978-1-8383142-1-7), both below, and Mark Ward's Nightlight (Salmon Poetry, 2023, 9781915022288).

The essential anthologies

The Gaelic tradition

An Duanaire 1600–1900: Poems of the Dispossessed Ed. Seán Ó Tuama, with verse translations by Thomas Kinsella. The essential bilingual gateway to the Gaelic tradition — facing-page Irish and English, covering the poetry of dispossession from the collapse of the bardic order to the nineteenth century. If this site recommends one book for the Gaelic tradition, it is this one.

The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse Ed. Thomas Kinsella. Kinsella's own selection across the whole tradition, in both languages, with his translations. Notable for taking the Irish-language material as central rather than as background.

The general anthologies

The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing Volumes I–III (1991), general editor Seamus Deane. 4,044 double-columned pages. Volumes IV–V (2002), Irish Women's Writing and Traditions, ed. Angela Bourke, Siobhán Kilfeather, Maria Luddy, Margaret Mac Curtain, Gerardine Meaney, Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha, Mary O'Dowd and Clair Wills. Cork University Press in association with Field Day. ~3,000 pages, eleven years in the making, over 700 writers. The standard large-scale reference — and structurally unreliable on women writers across volumes I–III, where not one of the 44 section editors was a woman. Anything sourced from I–III must be checked against IV–V or elsewhere. Volumes IV–V are not an appendix: they are the most comprehensive corpus of Irish women's writing published. See women poets.

The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry A standard general anthology of Irish poetry.

Contemporary and specialist

Queering the Green: Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry Ed. Paul Maddern. Lifeboat Press, 26 November 2021. ISBN 9781916222830. Paperback, 423pp. 31 poets. The standard contemporary LGBTQ+ anthology — see LGBTQ+ poets.

The White Page / An Bhileog Bhán Ed. Joan McBreen, 1999. Gathered Irish women poets of the twentieth century; a standard reference. See women poets.

The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry Wake Forest University Press — the main US publisher of contemporary Irish poets, and the usual route by which Irish poetry reaches an American readership. A series rather than a single anthology; it also includes an anthology of Irish women poets.

Green Carnations / Glas na Gile Ed. John Ennis. BookHub Publishing, late 2020. ISBN 978-1-8383142-1-7. 25 contributing LGBT+ poets from the island of Ireland.

Also worth knowing about

• Poems That Matter
• Windharp
• The Bloodaxe Irish Poets selections

Key single-author books cited across the dossiers

Not an attempt at a canon — these are books that the other dossiers refer to and that the directory will need records for.

Major translations by Irish poets

A distinctive feature of the tradition: its major poets are also its major translators, and several of these are substantial books in their own right.

Bilingual facing-page editions are the dominant form for Irish-language poets reaching English readers — Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's Pharaoh's Daughter and The Fifty Minute Mermaid carry translations by Muldoon, Heaney, McGuckian and Ní Chuilleanáin. The translator matters as much as the poet here: Muldoon's Ní Dhomhnaill is a different book from Ní Chuilleanáin's.

Last checked 2026-08-13