President Michael D. Higgins is set to release Against All Certainty, a new spoken word album of his poems set to music and recorded in Áras an Uachtaráin.
Released on folk and trad label Claddagh Records 5 September, the 10-track album will feature music by Irish musician and filmmaker Myles O'Reilly, with the title track available to stream now.
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The new record is the debut spoken word collection by the President, who leaves office after serving two terms as President of Ireland this November.
The producers of project said listeners can expect to "find themselves fully transposed into the incredibly interesting life and times of the poet before he became Ireland's President, from childhood to adulthood".
A series of videos will also be released as part of the project, which, among things, will depict the "hardship of the President’s" early life.
Born in 1941 in Limerick City and raised in County Clare, President Higgins has published four collections of poetry - The Betrayal; The Season of Fire; An Arid Season; and New and Selected Poems.
On 11 November 2011, Mr Higgins was inaugurated as the ninth President of Ireland. On 11 November 2018, he was inaugurated for a second term.
O’Reilly has previously released ambient albums and has collaborated with Irish artists including Rónán Ó Snodaigh Ronan of Kila. His film work often explores themes of nature, spirituality and human connection through music.
Speaking about Against All Certainty, Sebastian Barry, novelist and Laureate for Irish Fiction, said, "These are truly prodigious poems by Michael D Higgins - not just a milestone in his own work but in Irish poetry.
"Readers and listeners will be astonished by their inspired truthfulness and their lovely adroitness of line. `…a new fire And a new day.’ Because the poet happens to be President of Ireland should not distract from the fact that these poems are written with all the precision and fervour of a free soul, and one that has made no bargain with rectitude or even the meaner sorts of discretion.
"They are not rawly truthful poems, but cooly so, and sometimes properly disquieting. There is something of the rejection of evasion in, say, the work of Paul Celan here, and what Matthew Arnold might have termed the 'dreadful authority’ of remembrance without window-dressing.
"Just the bare window both to look out of and look into. It feels like a signal achievement, and despite the mere chronology of the poet’s life, not at all in the nature of a swansong - in fact, the poems have the unquantifiable strength of youth.
"Like all tremendous poems they are being said for the first and the last time. They have appeared out of that ‘nowhere,’ that elusive ‘thin air,’ that all poets long to connect to. What a miracle."
The tracklist for Against All Certainty is:
The Truth of Poetry
Brothers
Katie’s Song
Dark Memories
My Mother Married my Father in Mount Melleray in 1937
The Death of The Red Cow
Against All Certainty
The Betrayal
The Death of Mary Doyle
Stargazer
