This book, by the eminent poetry critic Neil Corcoran, examines the ways in which the work of significant modern Irish, British and American poets interacts with or ‘negotiates’ different contexts – historical, social, political, artistic and aesthetic. In Part 1 important work by David Jones, Robert Graves, Seamus Heaney and Bob Dylan is shown to negotiate poetic methods – both traditional and modernist – and also the work of major earlier writers to produce strikingly original new forms; and Derek Mahon’s prose is read in the light of these concerns. The books shows how, by negotiating in this way, their work engages profoundly with complex and sometimes terrible histories, including the First World War and the Northern Irish Troubles. Part 2 discusses the ways in which ‘ekphrastic’ work – poems which engage with visual art – by Elizabeth Bishop, W. S. Graham, John Ashbery, Sylvia Plath and Ciaran Carson negotiates comparable poetic and historical inheritances while also inventively responding to work by significant artists, notably Parmigianino, Poussin, de Chirico, Klee and members of the St Ives School. The book is a signal contribution to current critical debates about these poets, situating them in original or newly clarified contexts, and it offers exemplary close readings of noteworthy poems.

"Full of wonder." —Elizabeth Acevedo A Best Book of the Year at BuzzFeed, Refinery29, and Entropy Magazine What makes a self? In her remarkable debut collection of poems, Destiny O. Birdsong writes fearlessly towards this question. Laced with ratchetry, yet hungering for its own respectability, Negotiations is about what it means to live in this America, about Cardi B and top-tier journal publications, about autoimmune disease and the speaker’s intense hunger for her own body—a surprise of self-love in the aftermath of both assault and diagnosis. It’s a series of love letters to black women, who are often singled out for abuse and assault, silencing and tokenism, fetishization and cultural appropriation in ways that throw the rock, then hide the hand. It is a book about tenderness and an indictment of people and systems that attempt to narrow black women’s lives, their power. But it is also an examination of complicity—both a narrative and a black box warning for a particular kind of self-healing that requires recognizing culpability when and where it exists.

Between Two Fires is about the transnational movement of poetry during the Cold War. Beginning in the 1950s, it examines transnational engagements across the Iron Curtain, reassessing US poetry through a consideration of overlooked radical poets of the mid-century, and then asking what such transactions tell us about the way that anglophone culture absorbed new models during this period. The Cold War synchronized culture across the globe, leading to similar themes, forms, and critical maneuvers. Poetry, a discourse routinely figured as distant from political concerns, was profoundly affected by the ideological pressures of the period. But beyond such mirroring, there were many movements across the Iron Curtain, despite the barriers of cultural and language difference, state security surveillance, spies, traitors and translators. Justin Quinn shows how such factors are integral to transnational cultural movements during this period, and have influenced even postwar anglophone poetry that is thematically distant from the Cold War. For the purposes of the study, Czech poetry—its writers, its translators, its critics—stands on the other side of the Iron Curtain as receptor and, which has been overlooked, part creator, of the anglophone tradition in this period. By stepping outside the frameworks by which anglophone poetry is usually considered, we see figures such as Robert Lowell, Derek Walcott, Allen Ginsberg, and Seamus Heaney, in a new way, with respect to the ideological mechanisms that were at work behind the promotion of the aesthetic as a category independent of political considerations, foremost among these postcolonial theory.

The award of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature to Seamus Heaney recognized not only the aesthetic achievement of his work, but also its political urgency. Here Steven Matthews presents a genealogy of Irish poetry which centres upon Heaney's recent preoccupation with the relations between poetry, politics and history. Writing from the perspective of Irish critical responses to the poetry, he discusses a wide range of work from John Hewitt through Heaney himself to Paul Muldoon. All of these poets have been inspired directly or indirectly by the situation in the North of Ireland. Placing the poems in their historical context, the author also analyses how these poets have reacted to the influence of W.B. Yeats. This important book offers a new approach to Irish poetry, linking it for the first time to the crucial political and historical events which lie at its centre.

Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature reveals an intriguing history of relationships among poets and editors from Ireland and Nigeria, as well as Britain and the Caribbean, during the mid-twentieth-century era of decolonization. The book explores what such leading anglophone poets as Seamus Heaney, Christopher Okigbo, and Derek Walcott had in common: 'peripheral' origins and a desire to address transnational publics without expatriating themselves. The book reconstructs how they gained the imprimatur of both local and London-based cultural institutions. It shows, furthermore, how political crises challenged them to reconsider their poetry's publics. Making substantial use of unpublished archival material, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma examines poems in print, often the pages on which they first appeared, in order to chart the transformation of the anglophone literary world. He argues that these poets' achievements cannot be extricated from the transnational networks through which their poems circulated - and which they in turn remade.

Even in an age of emerging nationhood, English men and women still thought very much in terms of their parishes, towns, and counties. This book examines the vitality of early modern local consciousness and its deployment by writers to mediate the larger political, religious, and cultural changes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture offers a new perspective on early eighteenth century poetry and literary culture, arguing that long-neglected Whig poets such as Joseph Addison, John Dennis, Thomas Tickell, and Richard Blackmore were more popular and successful in their own time than they have been since. These and other Whig writers produced elevated poetry celebrating the political and military achievements of William III's Britain, and were committed to an ambitious project to create a distinctively Whiggish English literary culture after the Revolution of 1688. Far from being the penniless hacks and dunces satirized by John Dryden and the Scriblerians, they were supported by the patronage of the wealthy Whig aristocracy, and their works promoted as a new English literature to rival that of classical Greece and Rome. Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture maps for the first time the evolution of an alternative early eighteenth-century poetic tradition which is central to our understanding of the literary history of the period.