To the Winds Our Sails

The best writing from Galicia's outstanding contemporary women poets awaits the reader of To the Winds Our Sails.

Co-edited by Irish poet Mary O'Donnell and Galician scholar Manuela Palacios, this anthology offers a unique insight into the imaginative, social, ecological and personal preoccupations with which Galician poets have engaged in recent decades. Ten poets ranging in age, experience and style, are represented with five translations each. An interesting feature of this anthology is that each Galician poet has selected one poem in five to be rendered purely in the Irish language. This tri-lingual approach is an attempt to represent the cultural and linguistic concerns which both Ireland and Galicia have shared historically.

Irish poets featured include Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Maurice Harmon and Catherine Phil MacCarthy, alongside Galician writers Chus Pato, Marilar Aleixandre and Xohanna Torres. For several of these well-known Galician poets, this is their first appearance in English.

"Galicia has long been seen as our distant, neglected overseas cousin and this anthology brings her poetry into our house for the first time, bright-voiced and strangely familiar."
Michael O'Loughlin

"To the Winds Our Sails is a vibrant and moving homage to what can be found in translation... The collection bears eloquent witness to translation as the supreme art of discovery and contains vivid and memorable recastings of the persuasive force of the Galician originals. To the Winds Our Sails is an invitation to journey to worlds without ends."
Michael Cronin, Dublin City University