KATHERINE DUFFY was born in Dundalk in 1962. Her debut poetry collection, The Erratic Behaviour of Tides, was published by Dedalus Press in 1998, and was followed by Sorrow's Egg in 2011. She also writes fiction and in 2006 received the Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year award. Her fiction in the Irish language includes her award-winning novel for young adults, Splanctha (Cló Iar-Chonnachta, 1998). And she has translated stories by leading Irish language authors into English. She lives in Dublin where she works as a translator in the Houses of the Oireachtas.

Just over a dozen years since her much-praised debut, Katherine Duffy's follow-up, Sorrow's Egg, shows an increased maturity of voice, facing, as it does, the twin subjects of loss and grief and the intimations of mortality which accompany them.

Inventive in form and agile in movement, Sorrow's Egg is also very much a celebration of the way in which artistic endeavour negotiates with the abyss, and includes poems inspired, for example, by the focus of a traditional piper at play ("all that is not music / elbowed / out of the way of the tune") as well as the title poem which, against a background of daily routine, senses "Somewhere in all of this / sorrow's egg is / tucked away. Somewhere, / warming."