Series Editor's Introduction from Lucy Collins

If Ever You Go is a new collection of poetry and song exploring and celebrating Dublin life from the eighteenth century to the present. Commissioned by Dublin City Council Libraries for 'Dublin: One City, One Book 2014', and published by Dedalus Press, the volume contains more than 300 poems, arranged street by street from Ormonde Quay to the Blessington Street Basin, from Malahide to Glencullen. Many well known writers are represented here: Jonathan Swift, W. B. Yeats, Austin Clarke and Patrick Kavanagh, as well as contemporary figures such as Thomas Kinsella, Paula Meehan and David Wheatley. In these texts, the history of the city over three centuries is brought vividly to life.

These lectures offers a series of reflections on poems from this anthology. Each of the four speakers has chosen a particular theme and explores it in relation to a group of poems, reflecting on the richness and variety of these texts. These talks remind us of the important role that Dublin has played in the work of Irish poets over the centuries.