His collections of poetry include The Irish for No (1987), winner of the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize; Belfast Confetti (1990), which won the Irish Times' Irish Literature Prize for Poetry; and First Language: Poems (1993), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize.
He is also an accomplished musician, and the author of Last Night's Fun: About Time, Food and Music (1996), a study of Irish traditional music.