In the same way that Andrew Carpenter's 1998 anthology "Verse in English from Eighteenth-Century Ireland" changed our perception of Irish writing in English from that period, so this companion volume "Verse in English from Tudor and Stuart Ireland" explodes the myth that no English verse of value has survived from sixteenth- or seventeenth-century Ireland. As this exciting and original anthology shows, hundreds of poets were active in Ireland at the time. The work of a few of them — Edmund Spenser and the young Jonathan Swift in particular – is well-known today: but almost everything else in this anthology — taken from manuscripts or from the original printings — appears here for the first time in over three hundred years. The poets who wrote these verses, otherwise unknown men and women from the worlds of the Old English and native Irish, or visitors or settlers newly arrived from England, emerge from the pages of this book as sardonic observers of the dangerous times in which they lived, and as writers of originality, freshness and, sometimes, of wit and ingenuity. There is astonishing variety of material in the 200 poems gathered here — love songs, ballads, verse letters, laments, death-bed repentances, elegies, political lampoons and theological speculations. There are verses from well-bred coteries in Dublin Castle and verses scratched on gateposts; there are hymns and curses, echoes and allegories, prayers and squibs; there are coarse poems, gentle poems, angry poems and mad poems. The book proves triumphantly that, from the beginning of the Tudor period until the Battle of the Boyne, verse in English was written, read and recited wherever English-speakers were to be found in Ireland. "Verse in English from Tudor and Stuart Ireland" is not only a major contribution to Irish cultural history, but a book which introduces to modern readers a memorable range of original and unjustly neglected Irish poetic voices.
