The gift of Joan McBreen's poetry is her ability to distill the essence of a moment, and bring its unique insight as a flame to light the darkness of our understanding. She does this with an effortless elegance, a sure touch, and a lyric voice which is attuned to the inward echoes of the psyche. In an article in the Washington Review American poet Paul Genega has written of her work, "...one is struck by the lyrical magic of the language, the precision of the diction, the absolute rightness of each and every word. There is a simplicity and straight-forwardness to McBreen's poems, but it is the simplicity of a pleasing, inviting facade, behind which lie nuances of association, emotion and meaning." McBreen's poems "...have a haunting quality that lingers and beckons the reader to return to them. They are poems of place and home and moment, unmistakably connected to the concrete world, each drawn from some special recognition of an object or event that extends beyond the poet's life into our own.

Kathleen Cain, The Bloomsbury Review

Joan McBreen is from Sligo. She divides her time between Tuam and Renvyle, County Galway. Her other poetry collections are: The Wind Beyond the Wall (Story Line Press, 1990), A Walled Garden in Moylough (Story Line Press and Salmon Poetry, 1995) and Winter in the Eye - New and Selected Poems (Salmon Poetry, 2003). She was awarded an MA from University College, Dublin in 1997. Her anthology The White Page / An Bhileog Bhán - Twentieth-Century Irish Women Poets was published by Salmon in 1999 and is in its third reprint. Her poetry is published widely in Ireland and abroad and has been broadcast, anthologised and translated into many languages. Her CD The Long Light on the Land - Selected Poems, read to a background of traditional Irish airs and classical music, was produced by Ernest Lyons Productions, Castlebar, County Mayo in 2004. She has given readings and talks in many universities in the USA including Emory, Villanova, De Paul (Chicago), Cleveland, Lenoir Rhynne, N.C. and the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Joan McBreen's 2009 publications include a collection, Heather Island and the anthology The Watchful Heart - A New Generation of Irish Poets - Poems and Essays. 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.