This work reshapes our understanding of contemporary Irish poetry and offers a new account of poetic form.

This Companion brings together sixteen essays that explore the full diversity of British poetry since the Second World War. Focusing on famous and neglected names alike, from Dylan Thomas to John Agard, leading scholars provide readers with insight into the ongoing importance and profundity of post-war poetry.

This book provides an overview of poetry from England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland from the postwar period through to the twenty-first century.

Forty chapters, written by leading scholars across the world, describe the latest thinking on modern Irish poetry. The Handbook begins with a consideration of Yeats's early work, and the legacy of the 19th century. The broadly chronological areas which follow, covering the period from the 1910s through to the 21st century, allow scope for coverage of key poetic voices in Ireland in their historical and political context. From the experimentalism of Beckett, MacGreevy, and others of the modernist generation, to the refashioning of Yeats's Ireland on the part of poets such as MacNeice, Kavanagh, and Clarke mid-century, through to the controversially titled post-1969 'Northern Renaissance' of poetry, this volume will provide extensive coverage of the key movements of the modern period. The Handbook covers the work of, among others, Paul Durcan, Thomas Kinsella, Brendan Kennelly, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Michael Longley, Medbh McGuckian, and Ciaran Carson. The thematic sections interspersed throughout - chapters on women's poetry, religion, translation, painting, music, stylistics - allow for comparative studies of poets north and south across the century. Central to the guiding spirit of this project is the Handbook's consideration of poetic forms, and a number of essays explore the generic diversity of poetry in Ireland, its various manipulations, reinventions and sometimes repudiations of traditional forms. The last essays in the book examine the work of a 'new' generation of poets from Ireland, concentrating on work published in the last two decades by Justin Quinn, Leontia Flynn, Sinead Morrissey, David Wheatley, Vona Groarke, and others.

Limits and Languages in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry examines the transactions between the two main languages of Irish literature, English and Irish, and their formative role in contemporary poetry by Irish women. Daniela Theinová explores the works of well-known poets such as Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Biddy Jenkinson and Medbh McGuckian, combining for the first time a critical analysis of the language issue with a focus on the historical marginality of women in the Irish literary tradition. Acutely alert to the textures of individual poems even as she reads these against broader critical-theoretical horizons, Theinová engages directly with texts in both Irish and English. By highlighting these writers’ uneasy poetic and linguistic identity, and by introducing into this wider context some more recent poets—including Vona Groarke, Caitríona O’Reilly, Sinéad Morrissey, Ailbhe Darcy and Aifric Mac Aodha—this book proposes a fundamental critical reconsideration of major late-twentieth-century Irish women poets, and, by extension, the nation’s canon.

Combining detailed explorations of both mainstream and experimental poets with a clear historical and literary overview, Reading Postwar British and Irish Poetry offers readers at all levels an ideal guide to the rich body of poetic works published in Britain and Ireland over the last half-century. Features detailed discussions of individual poems that are widely available in anthologies and selected poems volumes Pays explicit attention to how to read the poems, focusing on language and form and the institutional conditions of literary possibility in which poets worked Includes poets of all types and styles from throughout the post-war period, including canonical and mainstream poets alongside experimental poets, women, and poets of color

Paul Muldoon and the Language of Poetry is the first book in years that attends to the entire oeuvre of the Irish-American poet, critic, lyricist, dramatist and Princeton professor from his debut with New Weather in 1973 up to his very recent publications. Ruben Moi’s book explores, in correspondence with language philosophy and critical debate, how Muldoon’s ingenious language and inventive form give shape and significance to his poetry, and how his linguistic panache and technical verve keep language forever surprising, new and alive.