This Selected provides an overview of Trevor Joyce's multifaceted poetic career and covers some 45 years of work. The books appears simultaneously with the first major scholarly volume devoted to his work.

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.

This extraordinary collection brings together the entirety of his work up0 to 2003 that Trevor Joyce wishes to preserve. Founder of the seminal New Writers' Press in Dublin, Joyce is Ireland's most stimulating late-modernist poet, unrepentantly engaging the global modernist tradition at a time when it would seem to many that Irish writers, whether in the Republic or the orphaned north, prefer to hunker down and be parochial. The book includes the early collections Sole Glum Trek, Watches and Pentahedron and the splendid re-working of of the Buile Suibhne epic The Poems of Sweeny Peregrine, as well as the later masterworks Stone Floods and Syzygy, the former nominated for the 1995 Irish Times Literary Award for Poetry, the latter a formal tour-de-force previously only available as a limited edition chapbook. The volume concludes with more recent uncollected work of great power and ambition. This is the second edition, in a slightly larger format, of a book first published in 2001 with the ISBN 0-907562-29-9.