Although one of Ireland's best known novelists and playwrights, Dermot Bolger has always been first and foremost a poet. This volume of selected poems celebrates his finest poetry written over forty years, from 1970s teenage poems up to his 2012 acclaimed The Venice Suite: A Voyage Through Loss, and including previously unpublished new work. On a public level it charts a poet's passionate engagement with Irish society. Yet on a private level it is deeply intimate, charting the author's life in poems described by Paul Durcan as 'pure poetry. The saddest, truthfullest poetry you can imagine. Poetry at its lyric limits.' That Which is Suddenly Precious reveals the full extent of Bolger's achievement as a poet.