The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry offers thirty-eight chapters of ground breaking research that form a collaborative guide to the many groupings and movements, the locations and styles, as well as concerns (aesthetic, political, cultural and ethical) that have helped shape contemporary poetry in Britain and Ireland. The book's introduction offers an anthropological participant-observer approach to its variously conflicted subjects, while exploring the limits and openness of the contemporary as a shifting and never wholly knowable category. The five ensuing sections explore: a history of the period's poetic movements; its engagement with form, technique, and the other arts; its association with particular locations and places; its connection with, and difference from, poetry in other parts of the world; and its circling around such ethical issues as whether poetry can perform actions in the world, can atone, redress, or repair, and how its significance is inseparable from acts of evaluation in both poets and readers. Though the book is not structured to feature chapters on authors thought to be canonical, on the principle that contemporary writers are by definition not yet canonical, the volume contains commentary on many prominent poets, as well as finding space for its contributors' enthusiasms for numerous less familiar figures. It has been organized to be read from cover to cover as an ever deepening exploration of a complex field, to be read in one or more of its five thematically structured sections, or indeed to be read by picking out single chapters or discussions of poets that particularly interest its individual readers.

This book demonstrates the legacies of Romanticism which animate the poetry and poetics of Eavan Boland, Gillian Clarke, John Burnside, and Kathleen Jamie. It argues that the English Romantic tradition serves as a source of inspiration and critical contention for these Irish, Welsh, and Scottish poets, and it relates this engagement to wider concerns with gender, nation, and nature which have shaped contemporary poetry in Britain and Ireland. Covering a substantial number of works from the 1980s to the 2010s, the book discusses how Boland and Clarke, as women poets from the Republic of Ireland and Wales, react to a male-dominated and Anglocentric lyric tradition and thus rework notions of the Romantic. It examines how Burnside and Jamie challenge, adopt, and revise Romantic aesthetics of nature and environment. The book is the first in-depth study to read Boland, Clarke, Burnside, and Jamie as post-Romantics. By disentangling the aesthetic and critical conceptions of Romanticism which inform their inheritance, it develops an innovative approach to the understanding of contemporary poetry and literary influence.

This book offers thirty-eight chapters of ground breaking research that form a collaborative guide to the many groupings and movements, the locations and styles, as well as concerns (aesthetic, political, cultural and ethical) that have helped shape contemporary poetry in Britain and Ireland. The book's introduction offers an anthropological participant-observer approach to its variously conflicted subjects, while exploring the limits and openness of the contemporary as a shifting and never wholly knowable category. The five ensuing sections explore: a history of the period's poetic movements; its engagement with form, technique, and the other arts; its association with particular locations and places; its connection with, and difference from, poetry in other parts of the world; and its circling around such ethical issues as whether poetry can perform actions in the world, can atone, redress, or repair, and how its significance is inseparable from acts of evaluation in both poets and readers.

A fresh, accessible and authoritative study that conveys the richness and diversity of Irish poets, their lives and times.

This book shows that Shakespeare continues to influence contemporary Irish literature, through postcolonial, dramaturgical, epistemological and narratological means. International critics examine a range of contemporary writers including Eavan Boland, Marina Carr, Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, John McGahern, Frank McGuinness, Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon, and explore Shakespeare’s tragedies, histories and comedies, as well as his sonnets. Together, the chapters demonstrate that Shakespeare continues to exert a pressure on Irish writing into the twenty-first century, sometimes because of and sometimes in spite of the fact that his writing is inextricably tied to the Elizabethan and Jacobean colonization of Ireland. Contemporary Irish writers appropriate, adopt, adapt and strategize through their engagements with Shakespeare, and indeed through his own engagement with the world around him four hundred years ago.

An examination of the nature and function of pastoral elegies in post-1960 British and Irish poetry.

This impressive volume provides over 1,700 biographical entries on poets writing in English from 1910 to the present day, including T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and Carol Ann Duffy. Authoritative and accessible, it is a must-have for students of English and creative writing, as well as for anyone with an interest in poetry.

A comprehensive and scholarly review of contemporary British and Irish Poetry With contributions from noted scholars in the field, A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015 offers a collection of writings from a diverse group of experts. They explore the richness of individual poets, genres, forms, techniques, traditions, concerns, and institutions that comprise these two distinct but interrelated national poetries. Part of the acclaimed Blackwell Companion to Literature and Culture series, this book contains a comprehensive survey of the most important contemporary Irish and British poetry. The contributors provide new perspectives and positions on the topic. This important book: Explores the institutions, histories, and receptions of contemporary Irish and British poetry Contains contributions from leading scholars of British and Irish poetry Includes an analysis of the most prominent Irish and British poets Puts contemporary Irish and British poetry in context Written for students and academics of contemporary poetry, A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015 offers a comprehensive review of contemporary poetry from a wide range of diverse contributors.

Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Climate Crisis addresses what is arguably the most crucial issue of human history through the lens of late-twentieth and early twenty-first-century Irish poetry. The poets that it surveys range from familiar presences in the contemporary Irish literary canon – Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Paula Meehan, Moya Cannon – to lesser-known figures, such as the experimental poet Maurice Scully, contemporary poets Stephen Sexton and Sean Hewitt, and the Irish-language poets Simon Ó Faoláin, Bríd Ní Mhóráin, and Máire Dinny Wren. Adopting a variety of ecotheoretical approaches, the essays gathered here address several interrelated themes crucial to the climate crisis: the way in which the scalar scope of climate change interweaves local and global, distant past and imminent future, nature and culture; the critical importance of acknowledging the complex kinship of the human and nonhuman; and the necessity of warning against the devastating environmental losses to come while mourning those that already occurred. Ultimately, by envisioning new ways of existing on an earth that humans no longer dominate, this book engages in what the philosopher Jonathan Lear refers to as a process of ‘radical anticipation’.

In twentieth-century Ireland the relationship between the personal past and narrative history has exerted a shaping force on the lives of individual writers and on the formation of literary communities. This study explores this important intersection of the personal and the political, and its aesthetic consequences, in individual poems and volumes by contemporary Irish women. Collins argues for the central importance of memory in the work of contemporary Irish women poets such as Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Eavan Boland and Medbh McGuckian, and for its significant role in their creative development and critical reception.