Category: Shortlisted/Award-Winning Poetry

Accurate Measurements by Adam White is unusual in that it is a poetic celebration of the world of manual labour, of craftsmanship and doing things in the right way. There...

Bloodroot explores the frailty and complexity of human relationships, often addressing the question of what it means to ‘belong’ in the world.

First the Feathers interrogates the position of the human in the natural world as a backdrop to a personal and political exploration of what it means to be alive —...

Four Thousand Keys, Linda McKenna’s second full-length poetry collection, explores themes of dispossession, dislocation and life on the margins between history and story. Combining archival sources, myth, family stories, ekphrasis...

Here are poems of wonder, imagination, grief, bewilderment and delight. Drawing on an awareness formed during a rural childhood, they record the natural world and the way we, as humans,...

The poems in In the Museum of Misremembered Things revolve around the local, the historic and the mythic. Linda McKenna’s poems are based around historical events and themes with a...

Jewtown explores the journey of Jewish people who escaped the pogroms in Russia in the late 19th century, eventually settling in Cork City.

Liberty Terrace features a bevy of characters who reside in a fictional area of Cork City in the period 2016 to 2020. The inhabitants of Liberty Terrace come and go,...

Off-Kilter sees the environment and the body under pressure—the landscape burns, the body sickens, relationships fracture. Threat looms large, yet these poems also chart a tentative path through the darkness....

Palm Wine Tapper and The Boy at Jericho is the diary of a woman’s journey from the nature-rich countryside and the red-sanded desert to the Lego-like city. Written in the...

In The Weather-Beaten Scarecrow, the second poetry collection by James Finnegan, he focuses on place, history, nature, movement, animal, landscape, humanity and what it means to have clear space for...

The Woman on the Other Side is a book of exploration. The poetry invites the readers into a world of fragments, between physical and internal landscapes.