I have published four poetry collections with Jonathan Cape: These Days (2004), Drives (2008) Profit and Loss (2011) and The Radio (2017).  These have won an Eric Gregory Award, The Forward Prize for Best First Collection, The Rooney Prize for Irish Writing, a Major Individual Artist’s Award from the Arts Council NI, The Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Prize for Irish Literature, the AWB Vincent Literary Award and The Irish Times Poetry Now Award. I have also been nominated for the Costa Poetry Prize and the T S Eliot Prize, and, after my first book, was selected as one of twenty 'Next Generation poets' by the Poetry Book Society.

I publish poetry in contemporary poetry journals, including Poetry Review, Poetry London, Granta, Poetry Ireland Review and Poetry (Chicago).  My poetry has been collected in anthologies of contemporary poetry, among others The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry (2010) and Poesie Irlandais Contemporaine (2013). I’ve travelled widely to give readings at literary festivals and events, most recently, improbably, to the University of Oulu in Finland and to Newfoundland.  

In my time as a Research Fellow at the Seamus Heaney I published a monograph Reading Medbh McGuckian with Irish Academic Press, about trying to make sense of Northern Irish poet Medbh McGuckian in light of feminist theory. I also contributed a chapter on Medbh McGuckian to The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (2010).  I have written essays on my own writing for The Edinburgh Review and The Irish University Review, and I edited five issues of the poetry journal The Yellow Nib with Frank Ormsby.

I am involved in the teaching of Creative Writing within the English subject area at undergraduate level through to MA-level teaching and including supervision of PhDs.  I am primary supervisor to one part-time and four full-time students undertaking PhDs in Creative Writing.