**Competition closed, congratulations to Emer.** If you were in secondary school in the ’80s or ’90s then you probably had a copy of Soundings. It was the go-to poetry anthology for Leaving Cert for over two decades and I’m told it holds many happy memories for many a grown up.(I don’t mean to kick you in the stomach or anything, but I’m too young to know, Leaving Cert ’04 REPRESENT! :p). Luckily, it’s got more than its nostalgia factor going for it. When the good folk at Gill & MacMillan sent us a review copy there was plenty to be delighted by on browsing through the poems as a Soundings first-timer. From Monaghan’s own Patrick Kavanagh (“the bicycles go by in twos and threes, there’s a dance in Billy Brennan’s barn tonight” - Patrick Kavanagh. “Nobody on them, just these feckin’ bicycles!” - Tommy Tiernan) to Eliot, Yeats, Thomas Kinsella … There’s more →