Small Stations Press is extraordinarily privileged to publish a selection of Cork-based Galician poet Martín Veiga’s poetry from the last thirty years in a bilingual Galician-English edition, Alfaias na lama: Poesía selecta 1990-2020 / Jewels in the Mud: Selected Poems 1990-2020. The poems are selected and introduced by fellow Galician poet Xosé María Álvarez Cáccamo while the translation is by contemporary Irish poet Keith Payne, which means the reader holds in their hands the collaborative work of three poets at the height of their powers.

In these forty-five poems, Veiga takes us from the Atlantic coast of his childhood in Noia to Cork in Ireland, where he has been living for more than twenty years. This move away from his native shores has led him, through marriage and fatherhood, to a greater serenity and depth of vision that will delight and move, inspire and surprise, in equal measure. This is the journey we are all required to make – from the chimera of the self we ourselves have shakily constructed to the substantial self that can only be the gift of another.