Winter in the Eye: New & Selected Poems brings together Joan McBreen's recent work with poems selected from her two previous collections: The Wind Beyond the Wall (1990) and A Walled Garden in Moylough (1995).

This volume captures her elegant and finely-tuned lyric voice. A subtle simplicity of language makes her poems of place and home all the more powerful; highlighting moments of universal awareness and reaching beyond the poet's life into our own. McBreen's recent poems about illness and loss are written with a spare, unflinching beauty. Her moving, elegiac tone is ultimately a celebration, as darkness gives way to light. This is a poetry that seeks and reaches toward harmony, and truth.

Joan McBreen's 2009 publications include a collection, Heather Island and the anthology The Watchful Heart - A New Generation of Irish Poets. Together with her ongoing involvement with Irish literary festivals such as the Yeats Summer School, Clifden Arts Week, Listowel Writers' Week and The Cúirt International Festival of Literature, since 2007 she has been Literary Advisor and co-ordinator of the Oliver St. John Gogarty Literary Festival at Renvyle House Hotel, Connemara, Co. Galway.