Selected poems from the prize-winning poet Colette Bryce.

Shortlisted for the Poetry Pigott Prize in association with Listowel Writers' Week

Through four highly acclaimed collections, Colette Bryce has steadily consolidated her position as one of the most important of the younger generation of Irish poets. Possessed of a preternaturally acute ear and eye, Bryce is the recorder and observer of tense times: perhaps no contemporary poet has better mapped the fault-lines of nation and family, of love and tribal loyalty, of landscape and border. In all this, Bryce again and again declares the primacy of song as a redemptive practice, and a glorious end in itself: no voice is more accurately pitched or effortlessly musical. Selected Poems draws together the best of her poetry from The Heel of Bernadette to The Whole & Rain-domed Universe, winner of the Ewart-Biggs Award, and is a marvellous introduction to the range and sweep of Bryce's work.

[Bryce's] poems, sensitive as the needle that registers some distant earth tremor, are delicately poised . . . Bryce's vision is questing, disquieting, dark . . . as she seeks out the truths of life and love that transform the human heart