In 1912, a bloodless revolution had already taken place in Monaghan that resulted in the overthrow of one ruling elite, which was replaced by another. What began in 1912 with the signing of the Ulster Solemn League and Covenant, followed the next year by the founding of the Ulster Volunteer Force, might be considered from the Protestant perspective as an attempted counter-revolution. It was, at the very least, a determined effort to remain part of the British empire, the spiritual and ancestral home of Monaghan Protestants. But constitutional nationalists were not prepared to give up the...

I bring together in Streets Where to Walk Is to Embark a wide selection of poems written about the city over the past two centuries by Spanish poets. The starting date had to be 1800 as I couldn’t find anything written earlier. The poems had to be recognisably about the city. There are probably many more poems written in London by Spanish poets, but I wasn’t about to enter into an archaeology of creation or sift through biographies, a task beyond the scope of this anthology: I wanted poems that mentioned London, whatever else they were also about. So all these poems have an explicit...

Mercedes Cebrian is interested in how the ideas and ideals by which we live our lives intersect with the minutiae of those lives: food, decor, travel, taxes, relationships, celebrity-watching, the quiddity of the everyday. I remember a board-game / from my child-hood: trees, houses, cars, / tiny people with fixed smiles, lives mapped-out,/ with consumer choices made for you/ and decisions taken for you / on the little question-cards she writes in the poem 'City now or soon', but the day-to-day of the shiny new Spanish democracy turns out to be not quite so picture-perfect, and in her surreal,...