Together these poems mingle the famous, the infamous, and the unknown into a beautiful and striking anthology. Fraught simultaneously with both violence and love, this work spans four centuries of romance, up-to and including the most modern of poets such as Sara Berkeley and 1995 Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney. It includes romantic favorites, passionate nationalists, Celtic heroes, and modern revivalists. For some of these authors, it is their first appearance in a U.S. anthology. This welcome collection captures the passion of being Irish and in love, be it the love of a woman or man, country or countryside, or the love of a freedom which seems perpetually elusive.

"In his selection A. Norman Jeffares illustrates this variety, choosing love poems from every period of Irish history. Some of the poets will be well known to readers: Swift, Wilde and Kennelly as well as the Nobel Prize winners, Yeats, Beckett and Heaney. Others will be lesser known but their contribution provides an opportunity to hear the authentic and intensely passionate voice of Irish love poems across the ages."--BOOK JACKET.

With its roots in the devotional verse of the early Christian church and the long lyric poems of the Irish bards, Irish poetry has a rich and robust tradition both of engagement and self-reflection. It has grappled long with politics and has provided the most eloquent response to Ireland's turbulent history, mediating and mitigating histories of loyalty and loss; it has soaked itself in the Irish landscape and Celtic myth; it has encompassed religion, so much a part of Ireland's cultural heritage. At the same time Irish poets have given their own original slant to everyday experience and affairs of the heart.Thematically organized and spanning many centuries, this selection also features a section of Gaelic poetry in translation, notably excerpts from the 18th-century epic masterpiece, Brian Merriman's The Midnight Court.

Compact anthology features many of the best works by 59 poets writing in English, among them Edmund Spenser, Christina Rossetti, John Milton, Robert Burns, and William Blake.

'Remembered Kisses' brings Irish love poetry and paintings together.

Jack the B.