This collection of essays and reviews by one of Ireland's leading poets and critics moves from assessments of the work of individual poets' work to explorations of broader themes and topics in Irish cultural history.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the men and women of Ireland experienced the brutal realities of a succession of wars - from the casualties of the First World War, to the domestic upheavals of the 1916 Easter Rising and the Irish Civil War. This book presents a wide range of poetic voices that chart the human experiences of these wars.

Gerard Fanning is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Irish poetry, "an enigmatic surveyor with an appetite for the exotic cultivar," as one reviewer has called him, a maker of taut yet limpid verse. Hombre: New and Selected Poems gathers the poet's choice of his three previous collections, together with twenty-five new poems which show him to be both spontaneous and inventive and, all the while, formally-grounded, full of what another reviewer has called "elegant intensity." 'Gerard Fanning's poems are perfectly pitched; their phrasing and tonal shape range from the use of...

Of War and War's Alarms is a unique study of war and revolution and their impact on the writing lives of Irish poets and novelists from WWI and the Easter Rising through the War of Independence to the Spanish Civil War, WWII and the Northern -Troubles.- These timely reflections on literature in wartime include such figures as W. B. Yeats, Thomas MacGreevy, Seamus Heaney along with Francis Ledwidge, Charles Donnelly and Padraic Fiacc, Benedict Kiely, William Trevor, John Hewitt and Christabel Bielenberg.