Poetry. Shearsman published Trevor Joyce's collected poems, WITH THE FIRST DREAM OF FIRE THEY HUNT THE COLD, to great acclaim in 2001 (and a second edition of the book in 2003), and this volume extracts his remarkable translation of the epic Sweeny Peregrine from that volume and offers it together with a large group of other versions from the Old and Middle Irish, thus offering Anglophone readers a glimpse of some very unusual verse that rarely sees the light of day outside academic volumes, while also transposing it into a form that will seem familiar to readers of Joyce's own work.

Trevor Joyce (born 26 October 1947) is an Irish poet, born in Dublin. He co-founded New Writers' Press in Dublin in 1967 and was a founding editor of NWP's The Lace Curtain; A Magazine of Poetry and Criticism in 1968. Early books include Sole Glum Trek (1967), Watches (1968), Pentahedron (1972) and The Poems of Sweeny Peregrine (1976). The last of these is a version of the Middle-Irish Buile Shuibhne, well known from Seamus Heaney's later translation in Sweeney Astray (1983). After a near-total silence for twenty years, he resumed publishing in 1995 with stone floods, followed by Syzygy and Without Asylum (1998).