All poets share a common task: to define, to memorialize, and never to exhaust the subject of love. Ireland’s Love Poems highlights one country’s extraordinary poetic tradition, in both the English and Irish languages, by male and female poets, both ancient and modern. Emotions of every kind are embodied in this celebration of love’s pleasures and pains, in forms ranging from complex ancient Irish ballads to forthright contemporary feminist verse. These poems consider romance in all its stages: from the thrills of young love to the commitments of marriage, from grief to amorous rebirth, from affection to idolatry. The result is a cumulative portrait of love that mirrors Irish history in its complexity.

Included in this diverse selection are Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, J. M. Synge, Samuel Beckett, Patrick Kavanagh, Thomas Kinsella, Eavan Boland, Seamus Heaney, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon, and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill.