42pp.  20.4cm.     2009

This latest collection of poems by Jo Rippier reflect his love of the impact of the countryside and its scenery, of water, and of fishing, as well as childhood and school memories, and the memorials of war.

Jo Rippier was born in Plymouth in 1935, and educated at King’s School Worcester and Emmanuel College Cambridge. He gained his Ph.D. in English Literature at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universitatät, where he was a lecturer in the English Department until retiring in 1998. His previous publications include The Short Stories of Sean O’Faolain: A Study in Descriptive Techniques,and Some Postwar English Novelists, a volume of short stories, Goodnight, Morning, and collections of poetry, Seasons & Remembrance, Beginnings, Endings, Past Present, Against the Stream and Late Motley.

Gerhard Elsner, who illustration appears on the front cover, was born in Senftenberg, Germany, in 1930. He was educated at the Universities of Freiburg and Karlsruhe. He has a major reputation in Germany, with pictures in art museums and public buildings in Freiburg, Tübingen, Frankfurt, Konstanz and the Deutscher Bundestag in Berlin.

160pp.  20.4 cm  2018

The poems in this book represent a lifetime's struggle to recognise and come to terms both with the world around, and what is going on in the mind at moments of personal consequence. They also reflect an awareness of the work of writers from the past which, in some cases, may have influenced what appears in this book. There is no attempt to find solutions, but merely to register and search for words  which try to present, in accessible language, what the author is feeling.

Some readers' comments:

"I don't think there was a single poem which however fragile or sad its emotion, however delicate or subtle its train of thought, didn't set up a poise and dignity for itself, a sort of tender formal strength."

"I always read the poems aloud, they have an internal music which I enjoy finding."

"You have surpassed yourself, you seem to me to have reached that stage in writing to which I can only apply the word 'exquisite'. Through the years you have refined your writing to the essential, the essence."

"a poetic voice, unmistakenly yours, gentle, altogether unassertive, tentatively exploring its ground, meditatively unfolding a thought, an idea, a feeling, a physical sight or spiritual insight, always taking the reader on an inner journey which leaves him wondering what it was that has suddenly made him calm and reflective."

"And whatever subject you treat, you have an unmistakable voice, not a whit of superfluous verbiage, but precision of a kind of lean clarity. and what stands out above all is what I once called 'tentative philosophy', no dogmatising but careful reflection which takes the subject beyond its immediate appearance into realms of thought and feeling."

"I find your poetry in its content and style reminiscent of Japanese poetry. It is a culture which has paid great attention to detail and careful observation. Appreciation of nature is fundamental to many aesthetic ideals in Japan."

"You are able to convey so delicately emotion, never letting imagery cloud the work."

You have such a way of making the reader see the ordinary in an extraordinary way."

"These poems exemplify in the purest manner your particular strength of catching nature on the wing - or rather gathering, from a fleeting impression or thought, a total ensemble; of turning a natural scene into words, as few or as many as needed, no more, no less, and therefore pure poetry."

38pp. 20.4cm hbk

The poems in the present collection are largely an attempt to put into words what is registered either in the mind, or when physically encountering the world around. But there are also reflections on what one experiences when looking back on the past.

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ISBN: 978-0-86140-066-9

21.6 x 13.8 cm.   112 pp.   1980

Vernon Scannell, in Times Literary Supplement, wrote of Martin Booth's previous collection, Calling with Owls, that 'the poems carry a strong sense of real experience observed with clarity and expressed with force and unwavering truthfulness.' In this, his sixth collection, Booth revised all that he felt worth retaining  from his earlier books and to these has added new poems which continue to affirm that he was, as Robin Skelton, in Malahat Review, stated, 'the most interesting and challenging poet of his generation.'

Martin Booth (1944-2004) was poet, publisher (The Sceptre Press was well-known for its single poem volumes), novelist, and biographer.

With a foreword by Edmund Blunden

21.5 x 13.8 cm.     143 pp.   1982
ISBN: 978-0-86140-122-2

During his life John Cairncross was considered to be the best trans­lator of Racine’s works, both from his ability to convey the ‘feel’ of the original as well as through the accuracy of his translation. One critic has said that Mr. Cairncross’s translations are ‘the only ones that arc both compulsively readable and capture the style as fairly as our language permits’, praise echoed by others, including the New Statesman and Times Literary Supplement.

In this collection from the French, Italian, Span­ish, German and Chinese, Mr. Cairncross demon­strates his ability with great skill. In La Fontaine’s Fables, as in the other translations in this volume, he captures the mood in every case. Each poem appears in the original language as well as in English, and, ending with a number of John Cairncross’s own poems, this book is a true pleasure to read.

with The Irish Bardic Poet

ISBN: 978-0-85105-360-8

19.8 x 12.9 cm.

In Medieval Irish Lyrics Professor Carney gives us text and translation of early Irish Poems, both secular and religious. The translations are sensitive and felicitous, the fruit of some thirty years of research in Irish language and literature. Several of the poems have hitherto been known only to a handful of scholars and some appeared for the first time in this book.

Readers of all kinds will find here an introduction to the poetry of Ireland in verse translations which catch the movement of spirit of the originals. Professor Carney has prefaced the whole with an introduction in which he places the medieval Irish lyrics in their social and historical context.

The poets represented here wrote for a society which employed professional poets who could claim to stand in a direct succession from the druidic order of pre-Christian times. This new edition includes The Irish Bardic Poet, Professor Carney’s noted lecture to the Celtic School of the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies (1958) in which he presents a comprehensive picture of the relationship between a Bardic poet, Eochaidh Ó hEoghusa and his patrons, the Maguire family of Fermanagh.

James Carney of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, is the author of Studies in Early Irish Literature and History, The Problem of St. Patrick and The Poems of Blathmac.

'These translations of Professor Carney’s, from the point of view of a telling economy and a regard for the original image, its absolute rightness, are far and away superior to anything else I have read.' The Cork Examiner)

' Professor Carney has thrown light where there were shadows before, and for this he is, as scholar and poet, due our gratitude.' The Dublin Magazine)

Collected, edited and annotated by A. Norman Jeffares

23.5 x 15.5 cm.     xxxii, 861 pp.  2001
ISBN: 978-0-86140-404-9

Poems and Plays brings together the contents of Oliver St John Gogarty’s fifteen volumes of poetry, including his Collected Poems. It also contains poems published individually in various journals and 232 hitherto unpublished poems; as well, there are his three Abbey plays – Blight, A Serious Thing and The Enchanted Trousers – published under the nom-de-plume Gideon Ouseley, together with Incurables and the incomplete Wavelengths.

Much of Gogarty’s poetry was classically inspired; his witty lyric poems have the elegant grace of Herrick or the terse eloquence of Marvell. His appreciative poems about his friends and his elegies for some of them are balanced by Martial-like satires; his enthusiastic enjoyment of beauty is matched by the encomiastic treatment of places, itself reinforced by a keen awareness of their historical and often dramatic associations.

Gogarty, the son and grandson of doctors, was born in Dublin in 1878. His novel, Tumbling in the Hay (1939; 1996) gives a sparkling account of medical student life in Dublin at the beginning of the twentieth century. When he was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin, Gogarty was befriended by the famous classical dons Tyrrell and Mahaffy and the philosopher Macran. At the same time he had a circle of contemporaries (many met earlier when he was briefly a student at University College, Dublin) known for their raffish behaviour and mocking, bawdy wit; among them were James Joyce, John (‘Citizen’) Elwood and Vincent Cosgrave. James Starkey (‘Seumas O’Sullivan’) was another contemporary companion. And Gogarty’s acquaintanceship widened to include George Moore and W.B.Yeats who, despite thirteen years difference in age, became a lifelong friend.

An all-round athlete who was a champion cyclist, who successfully rescued drowning men on three occasions, Gogarty followed up his medical degree with a spell of study in Vienna, returning to become a successful Ear, Nose and Throat Specialist in Dublin. His lively autobiographical As I was going down Sackville Street (1937; 1994) records something of the entertaining eccentricity of many of the city’s citizens in the 1920s as well as the characters of those involved in its cultural and political life.

Gogarty’s wit irradiated his exuberant conversation. Many of his Rabelaisian poems have remained unpublished until now. They circulated freely, however, in the talk of Dublin, especially among the group who met in Fanning’s public house or the Bailey, such fellow wits as George Redding and Neil Montgomery.

Gogarty, whose politically active friends included Arthur Griffith, Michael Collins and Michael Cusack, became a Senator of the Irish Free State. Kidnapped by the I.R.A. in the Irish Civil War in 1923, he escaped being shot by plunging into the River Liffey and swimming downstream to safety. Renvyle, his large house in Connemara, bought when he realised that cars made it more accessible from Dublin (he was an enthusiastic early motorist and Ireland’s first amateur aviator) was burnt down by the I.R.A. shortly afterwards. When it was rebuilt in 1930 Gogarty turned it into a hotel. There, as in Dublin, he and his wife entertained generously, their circle of friends ever-widening.

As he moved away from medicine Gogarty sold his Dublin house, 15 Ely Place, finding more time for writing in Connemara. In 1939 he went on a lecture tour in the United States and, disillusioned by de Valera’s Ireland, stayed on, supporting himself and his family (there were two sons and a daughter) in Ireland, by writing and lecturing. He came back at intervals, transport permitting, but died in New York in 1957, the year that he had decided to return permanently to Ireland.

Now that his work is being made available again, readers have the opportunity to appreciate the lively evocative writings of this Renaissance man whose poetry W.B.Yeats so admired, including more of Gogarty’s work in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935 than of any other living poet. His poetry conveys his infective love of beauty of all kinds, the fundamental seriousness beneath his witty persiflage, his moving awareness of Time’s inexorable pressures, and his emphasis upon the need to face death with dignity.

The collection is divided under the headings chosen by Gogarty himself for Collected Poems

Part 1 - Collected Poems (1951): Odes and Addresses - Earth and Sea - Satires and Facetiae - Love and Beauty -Life and Death - Elegies.

Part 2: Poems in Various Volumes - published and unpublished, not included in Collected Poems. Hyperthuleana (1916), Secret Springs of Dublin Song (1918), The Ship and Other Poems (1918), An Offering of Swans (1923), An Offering of Swans and Other Poems (1924), Wild Apples (1928, 1929, 1930), Selected Poems (1933), Others to Adorn (1938), Elbow Room (1939), Perennial (1944, 1946), Unselected Poems (1954), Penultimate Poems (prepared but unpublished).

Part 3: Poems published in journals and unpublished volumes. Odes and Addresses - Earth and Sea - Satires and Facetiae (Dislikes and Disapprobations, Limericks, Parodies, Light-hearted Verses, Some Martello Tower Poems, Seamus O’Sullivan Poems, Poems concerning Dermot Freyer, Jesting about the Sinclair Brothers, Classical Themes, Religious Thoughts, Political Poems, On Drinking, Medical Meditations, Monto Poems) - Love and Beauty -Life and Death - Elegies.

Appendices, Notes, Notes on the texts, and Addenda, including ‘Delphi’, written as an entry for the Newdigate Prize.

General Editors of the Coole Edition: T. R. Henn CBE and Colin Smythe

With a Foreword by T. R. Henn

ISBN: 978-0-900675-35-5

Studies and Translations from the Irish, including nine plays by Douglas Hyde

22.7 x 13.8 cm.  286 pp.    illus.  1974   Volume 11 of the Coole Edition of Lady Gregory's works

In Poets and Dreamers Lady Gregory has gathered together a number of essays and translations she had made from the Irish of Douglas Hyde, An Craoibhin Aoibhinn, ‘the Sweet Little Branch’, who was founder and President of the Gaelic League at the time and later to be the first President of the Republic of Ireland.

Lady Gregory has also written about other poets in this volume, notably Raftery, who was the model for Yeats’s Red Hanrahan, and also writes about West Irish ballads, and those by Jacobite and Boer and that beautiful poem by the expatriate Shemus Cartan, ‘A Sorrowful Lament for Ireland’.

Her other essays are covered by the Dreamers part of the title, ‘Mountain Theology’, ‘Herb Healing’ and ‘Workhouse Dreams’ among them. This edition contains a further five plays by Hyde, translated by Lady Gregory, three of which have not hitherto been published.

The Ap­pendices contain a number of early versions of poems and articles and includes ‘Dreams that have no moral’ by W. B. Yeats. This has been added from his Celtic Twilight (1902) as an Appendix in order to give an example as to how Lady Gregory worked together with him in providing him with material for his volumes. Lady Gregory refers to the story in ‘Workhouse Dreams’.

The Editors have also added a quant­ity of her revisions and an essay, ‘Cures by Charms’, which first appeared in the Westminster Budget with two of the other essays in this volume, but which was not included in the first edition.

21.6 x 13.8 cm.  

The tradition of carol singing in County Wexford goes back to the seventeenth century and continues as a living tradition today in the parish of Kilmore. The repertoire derives from a little book of songs published by Luke Wadding in Ghent in 1684 and from a manuscript collection compiled by Father William Devereux in County Wexford in 1734, which has been copied several times and is still circulated in manuscript copies.

Diarmaid O Muirithe has assembled the twenty-one carols which exist in the Wadding book and later copies of the Devereux manuscript compiled by Michael Murphy and Richard Neil in the early nineteenth century, and here presents the first complete collection of these rare texts.

The traditional airs which are still sung today were recorded by the Kilmore singers, and from this recording Seoirse Bodley has transcribed the airs. He has also provided a commentary on the musical mode. 

Diarmaid O Muirithe is an authority on the Anglo-Norman culture of south-east Ireland and Seoirse Bodley is a composer of international repute.

The reproduction on the cover is a detail from a woodcut, ‘The Holy Family with two angels in a portico’ c. 1502, by Albrecht Dürer.

More info →

ISBN: 978-0-85105-364-6

21.6 x 13.8 cm.

with 38 illustrations.

The primary purpose of this anthology is to demonstrate the nature and quality of the Irish poetic tradition during the troubled centuries from the collapse of the Gaelic order to the emergence of English as the dominant vernacular of the Irish people. The English translations, all new, have aimed at a close fidelity to the content of the originals while suggesting something of the poetic quality and the basic rhythms of the original Irish poems

This collection contains poems written between 1974 and 1978. These are the works of a visionary in the lineage of Blake and Coleridge, Shelley and Yeats who invokes the ancient wisdom of this rich heritage.

Out of print

38pp. 20.4 cm.

The poems in the present collection are somewhat autumnal in mood, reflecting both personal and spontaneous reactions to the world around. Sometimes strange sightings provoke personal reflections on the difference between nature and the modern world, whilst also revealing unsuspected significance.

Jo Rippier was born in Plymouth in 1935, and educated at King’s School Worcester and Emmanuel College Cambridge. He gained his Ph.D. in English Literature at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universitatät, where he was a lecturer in the English Department until retiring in 1998. His previous publications include The Short Stories of Sean O’Faolain: A Study in Descriptive Techniques,and Some Postwar English Novelists, a volume of short stories, Goodnight, Morning, and collections of poetry, Seasons & Remembrance, Beginnings, Endings, Past Present and Against the Stream.

Gerhard Elsner, whose illustration appears on the front cover, was born in Senftenberg, Germany, in 1930. He was educated at the Universities of Freiburg and Karlsruhe. He has a major reputation in Germany, with pictures in art museums and public buildings in Freiburg, Tübingen, Frankfurt, Konstanz and the Deutscher Bundestag in Berlin.

Jo Rippier was born in Plymouth in 1935, and educated at King’s School Worcester and Emmanuel College Cambridge. He gained his Ph.D. in English Literature at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universitatät, where he was a lecturer in the English Department until retiring in 1998. His previous publications include The Short Stories of Sean O’Faolain: A Study in Descriptive Techniques,and Some Postwar English Novelists, a volume of short stories, Goodnight, Morning, and collections of poetry, Seasons & Remembrance, Beginnings, Endings, Past Present and Against the Stream.

20.4cm 

In this latest short volume of poems, Jo Rippier shows how his love of nature has increased, developed and deepened through his recent volumes of poetry as he envies the arctic fox and admires precariously preserved idyllic landscapes. In 'Temporal', he fuses mortality and summer into an image of peacefully combined opposites. His description of the artistically observant church visitor's reaction, in 'Regarding a Church', creeping away 'uncomforted' and 'uncomfortable at registering expectations somehow unfulfilled' will remain a compelling image for the reader as it formulates that fleeting experience many people have without being able to say what it was that left them faintly uneasy.

A memorable collection, and as with Rippier's earlier volumes, one of Gerhard Elsner's superbly evocative watercolours decorates the dustjacket.

52pp.  20.4 cm.  2013

In a sequence of haunting poems the author has put down the random thoughts that reflected his sense of isolation and formed a barrier to keep him from thinking about the suffering of his dying partner, until he had to face the agony of the inevitable departure and reconcile himself to that parting.

Edited and introduced by Gregory A.Schirmer

Despite the relatively slender volume of his work and the obscurity that marked his brief life – he was known to his friends as ‘the  Recluse’ –  the Cork poet J. J. Callanan (1795-1829) has come to be recognised as one of the most significant Irish poets writing before Yeats.  Inspired equally by English romanticism and Ireland’s Gaelic culture, and drawing often on the life of Irish-speaking communities in West Cork, Callanan’s work negotiates with remarkable effect between Ireland’s two principal traditions, while giving voice to many of the cultural forces that were shaping Irish life in the early years of the nineteenth century.

Callanan’s poetry has been out of print since 1883.  The present selection brings together all his poems having to do with Ireland, including those for which he is best known – his poetic translations from the Irish, lyrics such as ‘Gougane Barra,’ and his long autobiographical poem, ‘The Recluse of Inchidony’. The poems are fully annotated, and original sources for the translations, where known, are given.  The introduction provides a detailed account of Callanan’s life, drawing in part on private letters and diaries, as well as a critical assessment of his poetry.  There is also an extensive bibliography that includes a listing of all critical writings about Callanan.

Gregory A. Schirmer divides his time between Oxford, Mississippi, where he is Professor of English at the University of Mississippi, and Skibbereen, West Cork. His publications include The Poetry of Austin Clarke (1983), William Trevor. A Study of His Fiction (1990), (editor) Reviews and Essays of Austin Clarke (1995), which includes a massive checklist of Clarke’s periodical writings, and Out of What Began: A History of Irish Poetry in English (1998).

Edited by Shirley Mulligan
Introduction by A. Norman Jeffares

During the past decades there has been a substantial body of bibliographical, critical and biographical material published testifying to Stephens' significance as poet, novelist, essayist, and short story writer. There has been an edition of his Letters by Richard J. Finneran (1974) and a two volume Uncollected Prose edited by Patricia McFate (1983). In addition, some of his prose works have been reprinted (The Crock of Gold; Irish Fairy Tales; Deirdre and The Insurrection in Dublin are presently listed by Amazon.co.uk), so a volume of Stephens' poetry is long overdue.

At the present time it is virtually impossible to locate any volume of Stephens’ poetry outside a library. In the case of his Collected Poems (1954), even if one finds a copy, it is difficult to evaluate the poet's progress, influences, or interests at any given period since the poems are arranged thematically under charming but elusive titles which, for the most part, tell nothing about the contents or period of their composition, although we are at least fortunate that the last three books in that volume are chronologically arranged. Furthermore, over one hundred poems published in volumes, in magazines, or newspapers were omitted from the Collected Poems. A complete chronological collection of James Stephens' poetry is therefore necessary if readers are to be encouraged to enjoy and study his work in depth, and that is what the present editor provides.

This volume contains more than 320 poems by Stephens, a biographical and critical introduction by A. Norman Jeffares (his last work before his death in 2005), as well as notes, indexes to titles and first lines, and an Appendix listing those poems that appeared in the 1954 Collected Poems. It is an essential adjunct to the library of every lover of Irish poetry.

1954-2000. An annotated edition of the poems Cambridge and Oxford

With over 120 pages of annotation and documentation by the poet and other Emeriti, Incl. Henry Chadwick and R.W. Burchfield.

This volume contains the texts of Francis Warner's Cambridge and Oxford, together with detailed notes to the people and places mentioned in the Poems.

‘One of the great teachers’ (Oxford Today, Michaelmas issue, 1998)

Francis Warner, MA (Cantab.) DLitt (Oxon.) divides his time between St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, where he used to teach and is now an Honorary Fellow, and St Peter’s College, Oxford, where he used to teach and is now an Emeritus Fellow, and Dean of Degrees.

Here he looks back over the last half century in his two universities with gratitude. This book takes the form of two poems, each describing a walk and the friends he meets and visits, or remembers: around Cambridge one night in winter, around Oxford one summer afternoon.

This new edition is fully annotated and documented, and as a result has become one poet’s portrait of his generation; of those who experienced the Second World War (some of them the First World War as well), and then devoted their lives to teaching the young in these twin cities.

‘You profoundly evoke the Cambridge of your youth.’ Henry Chadwick

‘The flow of characters through your Cambridge is the very living essence of what was good there. Your poem is truly matter from the heart, and the true heart of Cambridge.

‘I hope your picture of Oxford remains true . . . the continuity of values, the concern for the young, not the star performers but small things like reading a colleague’s piece of writing to check the notes; and whatever is the opposite of name-dropping – Bowra appearing because he was kind to his mother, Edmund Blunden because of his courage in suffering his traumatic memories of the First World War, Auden roused from a fit of gloom by a martini to give a glowing teaching-session to students sitting on your floor . . . musical rehearsals, trees, college gardens . . . beauty looking out from many places, in works of art and nature, half-perceived as you come and go in a civilized way of life . . . from friend to friend, generation to generation.

‘I can seen now how all your work has built up to a unity. It is about civilization – or perhaps a civilization, the one we inherit, and selects certain moments, certain people, who represent and have carried that civilization right from its beginnings. It is quite something to have done, Francis, and I am grateful.’ Kathleen Raine