Vital Signs

Vital Signs is a collection of powerful and courageous responses to the human experience of illness and healing.

Representing the best of contemporary and classic poetry, Vital Signs is a book for our times, a book for every reader, and a testament to the value of the imagination in the face of adversity.

Edited by the award-winning poet Martin Dyar, the inspiring selection includes poems by Leland Bardwell, Eavan Boland, Christy Brown, Raymond Carver, Imtiaz Dharker, Rita Dove, Vona Groarke, Seamus Heaney, Miroslav Holub , Nithy Kasa, Patrick Kavanagh, Paula Meehan, Paul Muldoon, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Bernard O’Donoghue, Seán Ó Ríordáin, Diane Seuss, Colm Tóibín, and many more.

Three centuries of poetry from the best of Irish, UK and American poets is represented in this Poetry Ireland publication, from Robert Burns to poems selected from books published in the last three years.

Ranging across centuries, countries, and continents, the poems in this anthology will inspire, comfort, and provide succour through the difficulties of illness and the processes of healing.

Judiciously selected and attractively presented, poems by such greats as Seamus Heaney, Seán Ó Ríordáin and Eavan Boland, along with diverse selections by the best of classic and contemporary writers, offer probing accounts of experiences of illness, recovery, and the end of life, as well as the subjects of public health, eating disorders and the coronavirus pandemic; they will also offer a fresh gloss on the meaning of healing.