Books published by Dedalus Press

Between the birth of the poet's daughter and the deaths of his parents, the poems in Monsoon Diary attempt to make sense of the world, from a mid-life flight from home en famille to new perspectives on both the past and the future.

News that the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature had been awarded to the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer was greeted with widespread approval by poets and poetry readers the world over. The author of fifteen collections of poems, Tranströmer had in fact been nominated for the prize every year since 1993, a sign of his huge standing and importance in world poetry, undiminished in recent years despite a stroke in 1990 that left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak. The Nobel citation praised Tranströmer''s poems of "condensed, translucent images" which give us "fresh access to reality", and that startling originality is everywhere to be seen in the poems gathered here, first published as two separate volumes by the Dedalus Press, The Wild Marketplace (1985) and For the Living and the Dead (1994), both translated by John F. Deane, the latter in collaboration with the poet himself.

The National Museum of Ireland / Ard-Mhúsaem na hÉireann is a repository of memory - but also a living place that enriches and challenges the present, that preserves for the future a witness to who we have been. We invited more than forty poets, writing in both English and Irish, to visit any of the Museum's four collections - Archaeology in Kildare Street, Natural History in Merrion Street, Decorative Arts & History in Collins' Barracks, Dublin, and Country Life in Turlough Park, Co. Mayo - and to write a poem prompted by this visit. The resulting poems in this anthology are inspired by, in conversation with, the Museum itself and those artefacts and objects from its collections that have engaged the imagination of the poets as they have engaged the imaginations of countless visitors through the years.