This volume combines new collections by established authors Deirdre Brennan and Maighread Medbh with a collection by emerging author Nuala Ni Chonchuir. The diversity of their work reveals much skill and insight with astute observations-sometimes comical, sometimes sad-on the human condition and the world around us.

Subtitled 'Reflections of a Reluctant Loner', Savage Solitude is an unusual and thought-provoking book, taking the reader on a journey through the immediate experience of being alone. Drawing on quotations from a wide range of poets, philosophers and writers, the conversation of the book moves in a kind of rolling wave that is simultaneously story and analysis, report and ongoing investigation, all the while pushing towards an answer to the question (more pressing than ever in our hi-tech age) of how to be alone. Maighread Medbh is an Irish poet with five published collections of her work to date. One of the pioneers of performance poetry in Ireland in the nineteen-nineties, she continues to impress audiences with her unique style. Born in Co. Limerick, she has pursued several ways of earning a living, including the Irish Civil Service and Internet content management. She currently works in the public library service. She lives in apartment-land, Swords, Co. Dublin.

Time plays a major role in Imbolg, Maighread Medbh's eighth book of poetry, which explores a period of gestation, culminating in attempted personal change. Over the fifty days of her lockdown diary, written during March and April 2020, her feet walk around a quiet housing estate, past empty buildings and a closed-down society. Change, doubt, and fear inhabit the book in differing forms, but sensual pleasure is always in the frame, and an abiding element of play.

This highly evolved verse novel, inspired by the flamboyancy of Irish artist Pauline Bewick's art, gives epic treatment to the themes of gender, the body, time and the meaning of myth in this post-postmodern world.