Gunpowder Valentine is the much anticipated New and Selected Poems from one of Ireland’s most distinctive and singular poetic voices, a poet whose work is at once precise and open-ended, true to the world of experience and, simultaneously, engaged with the mysteries of existence. In the words of Dermot Bolger, His is an imagination without borders, a probing and unsettling intelligence lightly worn. Gunpower Valentine presents the best of his three collections to date as well as a substantial selection of new poems which explore, among others things, the fertile ground of myth and show once again Perry’s narrative dreaming in full flight. Perry forces us to think about our place in the world, to take a stance, to engage with the poem which will not provide closure but an opening, a chink through which to observe the lived life. In this sense he is a moralist, but in the subtlest form, demanding that we join in his powerful statement of what poetry can do and why this art is essential. - Siobh n Campbell, from the Introduction