The gripping story of the tumultuous destruction of the Irish country house, spanning the revolutionary years of 1912 to 1923   During the Irish Revolution nearly three hundred country houses were burned to the ground. These “Big Houses� were powerful symbols of conquest, plantation, and colonial oppression and were caught up in the struggle for independence and the conflict between the aristocracy and those demanding access to more land. Stripped of their most important artifacts, most of the houses were never rebuilt, and ruins such as Summerhill stood like ghostly figures for generations to come.   Terence Dooley offers a unique perspective on the Irish Revolution, exploring the struggles over land, the impact of the Great War, and why the country mansions of the landed class became such a symbolic target for republicans throughout the period. Dooley details the shockingly sudden acts of occupation and destruction—including soldiers using a Rembrandt as a dart board—and evokes the exhilaration felt by the revolutionaries at seizing these grand houses and visibly overturning the established order.

" 'Fear is the liquid state of / pain as a wound is the solid state of / fear.' Mariano Peyrou's pulsating and mesmerizing meditation on love, time, and memory, here elegantly translated by Terence Dooley, is at once minimalist and expansive: its subtle repetition of key nouns and verbs creates a dreamscape in which 'two parallel lines meet / in your eyes.' If parallel, how can these lines meet? The path to understanding repeatedly confronts a mountain, because 'Similarity / and difference only become apparent / with time.' Peyrou's Possibilities in Shade is a beautiful love poem, an inspired ode to self-recognition." —Marjorie Perloff

The Enchanted Isles begins with a dream in which Oh, the narrator, returns to a voyage he made to the Galápagos - known as enchanted because of their danger-ous currents, which lured seamen to their deaths - ten years earlier. It was to be a voyage of enchantment, a lovers' voyage, an eight-day cruise paid for by a magical win at roulette, the number eight coming up eight times in a row. But in the meantime, Ah and Oh have separated, and so the memory dream is shot through with regret and also with a sometimes nightmarish vision of the ugly black volcanic islands where Darwin, observing mutations in finches, first came up with the idea of evolution. In a multi-themed jazz rondo form, extracts from Darwin's writings, geo-metry, chance and fate, giant tortoises complaining of human depredation, iguanas, jellyfish, blades of grass, extinct volcanoes, scuba diving and tender tourist conversation dance round and round. Occasionally the music breaks down and stutters: we hear dissonance as well as secret harmonies. This is a work of great lyricism, teasing humour and complex originality, a poem of everything. "A radical experiment in poetics, a world that is both real and unreal." -Miguel Casado, La Vanguardia, Barcelona "One of the best books in Spanish of the past 20 years." -Francesco Tarquini, Ispanoamericana, University of Roma La sapienza

Master of Distances consists of a hundred or so prose fragments fluctuating between dream, nightmare and a harsh reality: the bleakness of ageing, and accompanying the loved one through a long and debilitating illness. The continuity of mood and imagery gradually melds the fragments into a single poem. The poet stumbles confusedly as through a labyrinth of feeling and sensation. Who or what is the mysterious master of distances of the title? Time? Language? Oneself? The answer is a radical experiment in poetry and a new departure for this fine lyric poet. "Jordi Doce is one of the three or four living European poets whose work I most treasure. He brings all his faculties to the rich task of being; his voice inhabits the names, not just with wonder, but with new possibilities; [...] he is a companion, not a guide, always present with us, never merely pointing what he thinks might be the way." —John Burnside "One of the most striking elements of We Were Not There is that feeling of collaborative concern, that awareness of commonality, the record of experiences that permits us to recognise our common humanity." —Ian Brinton, Tears in the Fence "Few modern poets are better able to make us rethink our everyday purposes and perceptions." —Brian Morton, PN Review Praise for Master of Distances: "The book is further evidence of Doce's deeply personal lyrical journey, blending realism and metaphysics, an attention to the visible and lived with the imaginary and symbolic, the many faces of emotion with the bristling edges of thought." —Manuel Rico, El Pais

Mercedes Cebrian is interested in how the ideas and ideals by which we live our lives intersect with the minutiae of those lives: food, decor, travel, taxes, relationships, celebrity-watching, the quiddity of the everyday. I remember a board-game / from my child-hood: trees, houses, cars, / tiny people with fixed smiles, lives mapped-out,/ with consumer choices made for you/ and decisions taken for you / on the little question-cards she writes in the poem 'City now or soon', but the day-to-day of the shiny new Spanish democracy turns out to be not quite so picture-perfect, and in her surreal, rapid, darkly funny, lyrical poems she proves adept at putting her finger in society's wounds. Cebrian is one of the most fascinating and original voices in current Spanish poetry.

Like a glazier reconstructing a mirror broken into a hundred shards, Eduardo Moga assembles a portrait of his father, thirty years after his death, from tiny sharp fragments of memory. This is no idealized patriarch but an ordinary man who has lived almost his whole life in the grey, grey hardscrabble years of the Franco dictatorship when it was 'as if everybody's feet smelt'. He is seen with a forensic clarity through now a child's, now an adult's eyes and across the gulf that education, relative prosperity and happier times inevitably create. He is sometimes absurd in his opinions and little vanities, sometimes off-putting in his personal habits, angry, lost, pitiable, but often kind and wanting to pass on his erratic wisdom. Most of all, and this is Moga's great achievement, he is a real living person. Moga writes with lyrical depth about fathers who bequeath the best of themselves to their sons and sow only distance, and about sons who cannot forgive their fathers' vulgarity and cannot forgive their own estrangement and lack of sympathy. Jose Angel Cilleruelo, El Balcon de Enfrente In this splendid book Eduardo Moga dissects not just the story of a family but the story of Spain. Francisco H. Gonzalez, Devaneos

"‘Down from the mountain they forbade us swarm frantic men, brandishing their manuals of transcendental reason.’ The mountain is of course Mount Olympus, and the frantic men Spain’s all-male poetry establishment bent on excluding women from all their activities. ‘Not to confront them,’ continues Erika Martínez, ‘would be to bow one’s head in shame in front of one’s own mirror.’ Women poets have only been published in numbers in Spain in the last 25 years and still account for only 15% of the poetry books published every year. The Premio Nacional de Poesía has been awarded 52 times and been won by a woman 4 times. It isn’t at all uncommon for influential anthologies to be all-male or include at most one or two women among twenty men. Women are usually absent from the lists of the most venerable publishers. The founder of Visor, Jesús García Sánchez, known affectionately as Chus Visor, recently declared in El Mundo’s culture supplement: ‘…women’s poetry doesn’t bear comparison to men’s. There wasn’t an important woman poet in the whole of the twentieth century and there isn’t one now.’ This neglect and disdain (gradually diminishing in the new generation) and the consequent delay in the appearance of Spanish women poets in translation was one of the motives for this anthology, but to bring their musical, lucid, forthright poems to English readers is its principal intent." —from Terence Dooley’s Afterword to this volume This is the first anthology of its kind to appear in the UK, and features ten poets: Pilar Adón, Martha Asunción Alonso, Graciela Baquero, Mercedes Cebrián, María Eloy-García, Berta García Faet, Erika Martínez, Elena Medel, Miriam Reyes and Julieta Valero — one born in the 1960s, six in the 1970s and three in the 1980s.

I bring together in Streets Where to Walk Is to Embark a wide selection of poems written about the city over the past two centuries by Spanish poets. The starting date had to be 1800 as I couldn’t find anything written earlier. The poems had to be recognisably about the city. There are probably many more poems written in London by Spanish poets, but I wasn’t about to enter into an archaeology of creation or sift through biographies, a task beyond the scope of this anthology: I wanted poems that mentioned London, whatever else they were also about. So all these poems have an explicit connection to the city. Sometimes London is the protagonist, sometimes the setting, and sometimes it represents an outside space which the poet interiorises, but it always remains a real place, an urban environment to accept as it is or to confront. I didn’t select the poems on the basis of form or style. Streets Where to Walk Is to Embark contains every kind of expression, tradition, sensibility and voice – the only benchmark for inclusion was quality. So the anthology, as well as being a balanced history, is also a display of the breadth of styles of current Spanish poetry, and of the poetry of the past. The poems had to have been already published. I wasn’t looking for new work, but for a significant historical record. —Eduardo Moga

Mario Martín Gijón’s (Sur)rendering is a sequence of short pas-sionate lyrics describing a love lost and found. This might sound like nothing new in the history of poetry, but the poet immerses us in his story by a complex process of linguistic recreation: recreation in the sense of re-invention and recreation also as play, or playfulness.          Eduardo Moga explains his method: ‘The poetry of Mario Martín Gijón is characterised by a morphological promiscuity which springs from an intense awareness of the susceptibility of language to experiment. Words become lexical clay in the hands of the poet, or articulated entities into which other words may be telescoped. Words break, unscrew, crumble onto the page like sand. They are like scattered pieces of a mosaic reassembled to form a new puzzle. This is done by the insertion of brackets around letters, slashes allowing a choice between letters, dashes severing or connecting syllables, suffixes or prefixes belonging equally to the words surrounding them. It multiplies the ways in which a phrase can be read, multiplies its potential simultaneous meanings.� So the poet is able to juggle the memory of pleasure with present suffering, joy and pain in a single verse: (pre/es/ab)sence. Ambiguity striving for synchronicity, the language of love becoming as fraught with contradiction as love itself.

The Year of the Crab tells the story of an endless seaside summer, or perhaps a series of summers spent in the same place. It is a musical interplay of emotions and ideas, with recurring motifs and characters, often very funny, often profound, with a sense of childhood discovery remembered in maturity, an idyll with the background voices of fear, illness and death never far away, but also with strong intimations of love, nostalgia and happiness. It is a magical poem. “The Year of the Crab is transparent, of a transparency that is almost frightening: it speaks with the visionary ability of a child, but with the composure of an elderly man (…). It is a beautiful, marvellous tale of love and terror.� —Ada Salas, Nayagua “Mariano Peyrou’s writing is among the most personal and surprising on the current scene.� —Luis Bagué Quílez, Babelia

We have become used to a life of routine and uniformity: at work, in our relationships with others and with ourselves when we seek to understand what surrounds and subjugates us. Messages flood in and, instead of criticising reality, they reinforce the status quo and encourage us to accept it and maintain it. To counterbalance the hierarchies and justifications of modern life, there are voices raised in protest, like Eduardo Moga's, which don't mourn a presumed lost golden age, or bewail their disillusionment. That phase was left behind for Moga long ago, and we must presume he underwent an apprenticeship of disappointment: the discovery that the gods do not love us, but torment us, and then put all his efforts into unlearning it all. Moga's poetry does not preach, however, or burden us with rules or ideas to bring us to an imaginary better world, here or in the afterlife. The only life is this, the here and now, the life of the body, the life of the senses connecting us to the world. To restore our delight in the present is not a trivial mission and Moga confronts us time and again with our emotions and sensations, with the intention of blotting out thereby the monotonous discourse of the representatives of order. One might think, then, that the poet is acting like a strategist on a battlefield. Far from the Manichaean vision of the soldier, who is unable to see beyond dualities, this poetry is nourished by subtlety, detail and precision. It is not artillery, but a fine wielding of the scalpel which, with the delicacy and determination of the silversmith, dissects the tumour and cyst threatening our life, which is then able to flourish as a result.

How societies use the past is one of their most revealing traits. Using this insight "Ireland's Polemical Past" examines how the inhabitants of nineteenth and twentieth-century Ireland plundered their pasts for polemical reasons. The ten essays explore how revolutionaries, politicians, churchmen, artists, tourists and builders (among others) used the Irish past in creating and justifying their own position in contemporary society. The result is a varied portrait of the problems and tensions in nineteenth and early twentieth-century society that these people tried to solve by resorting to the Irish past for inspiration and justification to make their world work. This is a book that will appeal to those who have an interest in the making of modern Ireland as well as those concerned with writing about the Irish past at any level.

While the land question from the mid-Victorian period to the eve of the First World War plays a prominent role in Irish historiography, historians have tended to overlook its importance in post-independence Ireland and have generally assumed that there was no land question after 1922. Terence Dooley debunks this myth. In this first systematic analysis of the land question in independent Ireland, he contends that agrarian agitation proved to be an important stimulus to political revolution during the period 1917 to 1923. He assesses the dangers which agitation posed for the Provisional Government after 1922 and argues that the 1923 Land Act not only ended agrarian agitation but also made a major contribution to ending the Civil War. Dooley emphasises the significance of Irish Land Commission to Irish rural life in an extensive analysis of the working of the Land Commission after its reconstitution in 1923. The commission became the most important (and controversial) government body operating in independent Ireland. It acted as a facilitator of social engineering, compulsorily acquiring lands from traditional landlords, large farmers, graziers and negligent farmers and passing them on to smallholders, ex-employees of acquired estates, evicted tenants and their representatives, members of the pre-Truce IRA and the landless. It migrated over 14,500 farmers onto lands totalling almost 400,000 acres. The continued hunger for land and the impact of land acquisition and division on so many people ensured that the land reform question remained one of the most potent political issues until the early 1980s.