This book gives a breathing space for a number of poems which didn't fit into the scope of Brendan Kennelly's Selected Poems, A Time for Voices (Bloodaxe, 1990). It contains the poem-sequences Love Cry (1972), Islandman (1977) and A Small Light (1979), as well as poems from Shelley in Dublin (1974), and the full version of A Girl (1981), consisting of 22 songs, several of which are previously unpublished.

The four sequences have been unavailable for some time, and Brendan Kennelly is re-publishing them in response to popular demand. He has written new introductions for each as well as a provocative new essay to preface the whole of Breathing Spaces.

In these poems, Kennelly opens up his imagination, making a space through his poetry for constrained voices to speak, live and breathe. Many of these poems anticipate Cromwell and The Book of Judas, in which he allowed those more reviled figures their own breathing spaces. Many have been re-written, he says, 'in the light or darkness of what I've come to believe about poetry and language.'.