In a much-quoted passage from A View of the Present State of Ireland, Edmund Spenser considers the nature of Irish bardic poetry. Eudoxus asks ‘have [the poems] any arte in their composicons’ or ‘bee they any thinge wyttye or well favored, as poems shoulde bee?’. Irenius replies that, although ‘sprinckled with some prettye flowers of theire owne naturall devise’, they are ‘skilled not of the goodly ornamentes of Poetrie’, and, furthermore, are ‘abused, to the gracinge of wickednes and vice’. That Spenser would have been vaguely familiar with bardic poetry and have ‘caused diuers of them to be translated’ is not altogether surprising. His castle at Kilcolman was surrounded by a host of hereditary bardic poets who were constantly engaging in vibrant literary activity and exchange. This included different branches of the Uí Dhálaigh, who served lords like the de Barra and de Róiste. Beyond Mallow lies Cluain Mín Castle, where the poet Aonghus Ó Dálaigh Fionn, ollamh (chief-poet) to the Mac Carthaigh Mór, penned devotional poetry that uncannily echoes motifs in The Faerie Queene. There were also the Ó Dálaigh poets of Kilsarkan, hereditary ollamhs to the Earls of Desmond, who adapted – as well as commemorated in elegy – the beheading of three Fitzgerald (or Mac Gearailt) patrons. To the north lay the territory of the Fitzmaurices (or the MacMorrises), Lords of Kerry and bountiful patrons to a slew of poets. It is these poets – Spenser's Irish contemporaries – that are the focus of the present collection.