Kevin Graham, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Colm Tóibín: The Gallery Press September Titles Launch

The Gallery Press will launch three new titles by Kevin Graham, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, and Colm Tóibín at Notre Dame Dublin this September 2025. The Gallery Press is recognized at home and abroad as Ireland’s pre-eminent publisher of Irish poetry and drama in the 21st century.

Time's Guest (2025) by Kevin Graham

Many of the poems in Time's Guest, Kevin Graham’s second collection, find themselves outdoors — in woods, along the coast, down alleyways — by turns praising the natural world and mourning its evidential ruin. Time is the throughline and its paradox is uncompromising — ‘we shake the hand / of time and face an unbreakable fact’ (‘Walking Home Drunk from The 1975’).

Elsewhere, music and art inform jubilant lyrics that meditate on luminaries from J M Synge, Jack B Yeats and J M W Turner to The Frames, The War on Drugs and My Bloody Valentine. The central sequence ‘The Company of Trees’ plays with the language of ecology and literary history while ‘Easter 2024’ riffs on W B Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’ for the modern era. Rooted in the everyday and the otherworldly — both formal and free — these are poems that yearn for company and to be read and re-read.

Kevin Graham's first collection, The Lookout Post, won the 2024 Southword Debut Poetry Collection Award.

Cover art: ‘Variation, No.2′ (2023) by James O’Connor, acrylic on wood. Courtesy of the artist and the Taylor Galleries.

New Selected Poems (2025) by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

Among the remarkable characteristics of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry is its consistent excellence over nearly sixty years. Certain poems have entered the canon of Irish poetry. Her publishing career has been embellished with awards and honours at home and around the world. New Selected Poems represents generously each of her ten collections and culminates in a series of powerful new poems confirming that she is, simply, one of the finest poets at work today.

'One of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin's great gifts is her ability to bring readers, repeatedly and miraculously, to that threshold where all the intractable portals — of language, history, familial love — seem somehow ready to open again, letting in the light. Few contemporary writers possess her peculiar, and utterly distinctive, sense of the poem's inner grace, or have access to that soft core her words so delicately reveal, radiating outward to infuse life with meaning.' — Ciaran O’Rourke, Dublin Review of Books.

Cover art: ‘Portrait of Eilís Dillon’ by Edward McGuire, 1976

Ship in Full Sail (2025) by Colm Tóibín

In Ship in Full Sail Colm Tóibín’s ‘Laureate Lectures’ bookend thirty-four crystal clear essays, one written each month in the course of his tenure as Laureate of Irish Fiction. The myriad topics they embrace include Artificial Intelligence, reading Ulysses, the discomfort of Salman Rushdie in the wilds of County Dublin, Bob Dylan in concert, a life of Thom Gunn and the author’s role in a campaign to save the House of The Dead.

The lectures themselves ruminate on abiding interests — traditional Irish music and the visual arts. Ship in Full Sail — a veritable cornucopia — offers unmatched insights into the range of thinking and ways of working of one of Ireland’s belovèd writers.

Cover art: ‘Mung’ (1981) by Mary Farl Powers, etching, 49 x 39cm from the collection of the Arts Council/An Comhairle Ealaíon by kind permission of the Artist’s Estate c/o Jane Powers