This is the second of four collections of essays intended to be published under the general title Studies in Contemporary Irish Literature (only two were) which are devoted to critical analysis of Irish writing since the 1950s.

Incomparable Poetry: An Essay on the Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 and Irish Literature is an attempt to describe the ways in which the financial crisis of 2007-8 impacted literature in Ireland, and thereby describe the ways in which poetry engages with, is structured by, and wrestles with economic issues.Ireland and its contemporary poetry is a particularly suitable case study for studying the effect of the economic crisis on Anglophone poetry, because poetry in Ireland has a special relationship to the state and economy due to its status as a postcolonial nation-state. Beginning with a summary of recent Irish economic and cultural history, and moving across experimental and mainstream poetry, this essay outlines how the poetry of Trevor Joyce, Leontia Flynn, Dave Lordan, and Rachel Warriner addresses in its form and content the boom years of the Celtic Tiger and the financial crisis.Incomparable Poetry also discusses the concerns and historical contexts these poets have turned to in order to make sense of these events - including Chinese history, accountancy, sexual violence, and Iceland's economic history. In contemporary Irish poetry, the author argues, we see a significant interest in matching capitalism's accounting abilities, but in this attempt, these poems often end up broken by the imposition of an external conceptual framework or economic logic. Robert Kiely grew up in Cork, Ireland and now lives in London. His critical work has been published in Irish University Review, Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, The Parish Review, and Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui. His chapbooks include How to Read (Crater, 2017) and Killing the Cop in Your Head (Sad, 2017). He is Poet-in-Residence at University of Surrey for 2019-20.

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 the last fifty years Irish poets have produced some of the most exciting poetry in contemporary literature, writing about love and sexuality, violence and history, country and city. This book, first published in 2003, provides an introduction to major figures such as Seamus Heaney, and also introduces the reader to significant precursors like Louis MacNeice or Patrick Kavanagh, and vital contemporaries and successors: among others, Thomas Kinsella, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Paul Muldoon. Readers will find discussions of Irish poetry from the traditional to the modernist, written in Irish as well as English, from both North and South. This Companion provides cultural and historical background to contemporary Irish poetry in the contexts of modern Ireland but also in the broad currents of modern world literature. It includes a chronology and guide to further reading and will prove invaluable to students and teachers alike.

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.

In Poets of Modern Ireland: Text, Context, Intertext, Neil Corcoran discusses the work of Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Austin Clarke, Padraic Fallon, Louis MacNeice, and Ciaran Carson, constructing a critical account of the poets' work and putting it in the context of the contemporary debate surrounding their work. The contexts and intertexts Corcoran establishes for the study include the contentious debate between "nationalist" and "revisionist" criticism; the relationship between Irish and American poetry; the writing of "place" and its political significance; the focus on sexuality and eroticism; the persistence of religious impulse or theological content; the Irish language and the pre-occupation with forms of translation; and the foregrounding of textuality, which has affinities with, and may be usefully interpreted in relation to, some postmodern literary and cultural theory. Poets of Modern Ireland is a major contribution to the critical reception of modern poetry and focuses upon the major issues of debate in poetry criticism in Great Britain, Ireland, and the United States.