In Long Shadows, Short Days , is a vivid and moving portrait of rural Ireland, its people, its history, and its silent reckonings. These poems walk the backroads of memory and imagination, where boundaries blur between fact and folklore, faith and shame, justice and survival. Rooted deeply in the soil and soul of Irish life, the collection captures the rhythm of the seasons, the burden of inheritance, the outsider’s perspective, and the quiet toll of institutional power. From the ache of emigration and land lost to the sharp wit of village outsiders and forgotten rebels, Brosnan gives voice to those rarely heard. labourers, mothers, priests, and men broken by history. Some characters are drawn from lived memory, others from imagined fragments such as a crumbling newspaper dated 1888, unearthed from beneath the lino in Mallow, County Cork. This is not a nostalgic book. It is an unflinching act of remembrance and reckoning, where the “long shadows” of the past meet the “short days” of the present. Fierce, lyrical, and compassionate, Long Shadows, Short Days is a testament to the resilience of spirit and the stories that shape us long after we’ve left the land.