The story of the stolen or missing child sits at the heart of The Poison Glen, alongside a desire to bear witness to family loss and cultures of silence in Ireland. Weaving together landscape, history, and the compelling mythology of a Donegal site known as ‘The Poison Glen’, here are poems of grit and burning, of wildness, grace and magic, of dreaming and compassion. The collection is rooted by ‘The Foundling Crib’, a poem that dwells on a long-gone Foundling Hospital in Dublin, accompanied by poems written as responses to sites of various Irish church- and state-run institutions.

In poems both tender and ferocious the book illuminates questions that run deep in the Irish psyche. Ultimately it asks, How can darkness be overcome by light?