Are You Ready?"The Ireland of 2009 has almost as many 'serious' poets as it does blocks of unsold apartments. What I love about John Corless's poetry is that instead of pretending to sit po faced on the summit of Mount Parnassus, it goes absolutely in the opposite direction. Like Swift, Paul Durcan and Rita Ann Higgins before him, Corless takes the low road and shines the telltale torchlight of his killer wit into all the most embarrassing areas of contemporary

to the contemporary Ireland where he has lived over the past twenty years

The writing flies off the page

The Captain’s Daughter

translated by Anna Crowe

all very different but all opening up onto vivid and often painful episodes of life in Iraq – from Saadi Yousef

the egg and spoon race to the Cup Final

crying babies and the BBC World Service

the well-known Iraqi author Jalil al-Qaisi is remembered by Fadhil al-Azzawi

Shaman's Waterfowl Song Little sons

Galician-Portuguese Troubadour Poetry translated by Richard Zenith

Mok’s shared passion in life with literature

Peter Clark: The Arab writer in English by Geoffrey Nash