The Poet's Novel provides a unique entrance to the prose and poetry of many remarkable modern and contemporary poets including: Etel Adnan, Renee Gladman, Langston Hughes, Kevin Killian, Alice Notley, Leslie Scalapino, Jack Spicer, and Jean Toomer, whose approaches to the novel defy conventions of plot, character, setting and action. The contributors, all poets in their own right like, Brian Blanchfield, Brandon Brown, Mónica de la Torre, Cedar Sigo, and C.D. Wright bring a variety of insights, approaches, and writing styles to the subject with creative and often surprising results.

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 provides a unique introduction to major figures such as Seamus Heaney, but also introduces the reader to significant precursors like Louis MacNeice or Patrick Kavanagh, and vital contemporaries and successors: among others, Thomas Kinsella, Paul Muldoon and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. 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, the only book of its kind on the market, 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.

All of the poets interviewed in this collection are from Northern Ireland, all were born after 1920, and each has published at least one volume of poetry. Arranged chronologically by each poet's date of birth, this collection deals with an impressive body of work. The poets include Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Michael Longley, John Montague, Derek Mahon, Ciaran Carson, as well as less-known voices, including Gerald Dawe, Roy McFadden, and Conor O'Callaghan. The interviews explore the poet's work and development, the social/historical context, and the impact of assimilated influences. If they explore a poetry often rooted in "the North," they also suggest the individuality and diversity of this poetry, of work whose imaginative range is not circumscribed by either literal borders or critically convenient categories. The other poets included are: James Simmons, Tom Paulin, Frank Orsmby, Medbh McGuckian, Robert Greacen, Cathal P Searcaigh, Colette Bryce, Moyra Donaldson, Jean Bleakney, Martin Mooney, Padraic Fiacc, and Cherry Smyth.

In a volume that has become a standard text in Irish studies and serves as a course-friendly alternative to the Field Day anthology, editors Maureen O’Rourke Murphy and James MacKillop survey thirteen centuries of Irish literature, including Old Irish epic and lyric poetry, Irish folksongs, and drama. For each author the editors provide a biographical sketch, a brief discussion of how his or her selections relate to a larger body of work, and a selected bibliography. In addition, this new volume includes a larger sampling of women writers.

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.

Beckett's Political Imagination uncovers Beckett's lifelong engagement with political thought and political history, showing how this concern informed his work as fiction author, dramatist, critic and translator. This radically new account will appeal to students, researchers and Beckett lovers alike.