This extensive selection of poems from 17 collections, in a dual-language format, brings to the attention of an even wider public the heady abundance of a truly audacious talent. Ranging from the occupation of Palestine to human-earth relations, it is a book that gives credence to the idea of one borderless and unbounded creation.

Translated by the distinguished bilingual poet Paddy Bushe – one of the most talented translators of contemporary Gaelic poetry – this volume deploys the full range of an interpreter’s brilliance to render Ó Searcaigh’s work into faithful but fully-realised English language poems.

Ó Searcaigh’s transgressive and liberating writing crosses a clutch of borders and boundaries, loosening the Irish tongue into newly modern directions – and so setting it free to speak up, and sing out, “on the side of light, on the side of life” (Frank Sewell).

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“Ó Searcaigh’s transgressive and liberating writing crosses a clutch of borders and boundaries, loosening the Irish tongue into newly modern directions – and so setting it free to speak up, and sing out, ‘on the side of light, on the side of life’.”
Frank Sewell

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“Ó Searcaigh mixes the open-singing eroticism of Whitman with a sharp eye for the profound minutiae of the physical world, and he often adds a surprising touch of irony to the blend. It’s the rare poet who can imagine sheep as paperweights who keep the fields from blowing away.”
Billy Collins

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“Ó Searcaigh is Mozartian, following the Gaelic classical convention of the dramatic first person, which disinfects the ‘I’, moving easily from traditional metres to free verse and back, distilling the intense emotions of same-sex love into a lyric form that has not, I think, been equalled since the days of The Greek Anthology.”
Máire Mhac an tSaoi, file (poet)

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