This anthology presents the Irish tradition as a unity: verse in Irish and English, usually regarded separately, are shown as elements in a shared and often painful history.

The selection is in three parts: it begins with earliest, pre-Christian times and the first poetry in English from the fourteenth century; moves on to Irish bardic poetry and English poetry in the era of Swift and Goldsmith; and closes with nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets, from Davis, Mangan, Yeats, and Ferguson to Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh, and Seamus Heaney.