In the first half of the 20th century, the men and women of Ireland experienced the brutal realities of a succession of wars – from the unrelenting casualties of WW1, to the domestic upheavals of the 1916 Rising and the Irish Civil War; from the romantic idealism of the Spanish Civil War, to the unimaginable horrors of WW2.
Earth Voices Whispering gathers together, for the very first time, a wide range of poetic voices that chart the human experiences of these wars, compiled and edited by Belfast-born poet and senior lecturer in Trinity College Dublin, Gerald Dawe. Featuring over three hundred poems by celebrated poets such as C.S Lewis, AE, W.B. Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh and Seamus Heaney, and including new poems by Derek Mahon and Eilean Ní Chuilleanain, the anthology records the thoughts and experiences of poets as soldiers, patriots, observers, protestors, medics and mourners.
From patriotism to anger, passion to compassion, hope to regret, this groundbreaking new anthology embraces the complex reality of a rich, unique and historically overlooked period in Irish poetry.