The poems featured in this anthology are quintessentially human documents informed by humor, compassion, and a joyful and visionary element€"an impulse to praise what is really life and to protect it from the naysayers€"as well as by a salutary realism and irony.

This revised edition features the work of Tom Paulin, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Durcan, Aidan Carl Mathews, Anne Hartigan, Nuala n­ Dhomhnaill, and others who were not included in the first edition. Moreover, the selections from those poets featured in the first edition have, in many cases, been extensively changed and updated. In total, more than half the poems published in this second edition did not appear in the first.