The collection of essays, interviews and poetry compares and contrasts the work of people such as Adrian Henri and Roger McGough with the new crop of Liverpool poets such as Matt Simpson and Deryn Rees-Jones.

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.

Though more than a generation has passed since the revolutionary fervor of the Summer of Love of 1967, the 1960s in many ways seem with us still. From recurring debates over the war in Vietnam to the perpetually appealing music of the Beatles and the Rolling Stone to the concern about youth drug use, the legacy of the 1960s is ubiquitous in contemporary life. The Summer of Love brings together an impressive group of historians, artists, and cultural critics to present a rich and varied interpretation of this seminal decade and its continuing influence on politics, society, and culture. The Summer of Love, which accompanies an exhibition at Tate Liverpool, pays particular attention to the wildly creative psychedelic art of the era. Perceptive essays on psychedelic comics, graphic design and typography, light shows, and film successfully rescue psychedelic art from the fog of nostalgia and unjust critical neglect. Distinguished contributors also explore the role of 1960s fashion and architecture, and they consider anew the central influence of hallucinogenic drugs on the art of the era. Running throughout the essays are the elements of epochal change—from sexual liberation to student revolutions—that still form the backdrop of our collective consciousness of the 1960s. An incisive collection of writings on all aspects of 1960s art and culture, tempered by time and critical distance, The Summer of Love will be indispensable for those who wish they had been there—or for those who were, but can't remember it.

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The contributors to this book have explored various aspects of urban imagination, so intimately related to a peculiar social environment. They are historians and geographers, linguists and cultural students. Their methodologies are very different, their sources poles apart. And yet, they address the same object of study, social and spatial segregation and urban eruptions, though severally defined: from epidemics to anarchist scares, urban uprisings to mental maps, or the reverberations of urban memories in song, novels and museums. Case studies consider the towns of Liverpool, London, Hull, New York, Salvador de Bahia, or more generally France and America. The networks created among intellectuals and labourers, anarchists and migrants, or the lack of communication between those who feel oppressed (rioters, strikers, anti-vaccination protesters) and those in control, are a further common denominator. In a way, urban epidemics were the epitome of the repulsive character large cities possessed in the eyes even of their own inhabitants. If they were the receptacle of so many foreigners, and shady political characters, if they were the scenes of social and ethnic conflict, and violence, and promiscuity, and prostitution, and drunkenness, and pauperism, they were of necessity a festering sore which nothing could eradicate. It is strange that something of this fear should linger on today—otherwise, how can one explain the lacunae in the official memory of museums?—despite the cultural efforts produced in the opposite direction, with Ackroyd's love for East-End London, with the revival of a Little Italy in every major American city, with the nostalgic folklorisation of past miseries in Salvador de Bahia and in popular song. What sense of belonging can be generated by an obliteration of the past, what dynamic local culture can spring from an absence, from a hole in collective memory? This book goes some way to filling those gaps.

Text and Drugs and Rock'n'Roll explores the interaction between two of the most powerful socio-cultural movements in the post-war years - the literary forces of the Beat Generation and the musical energies of rock and its attendant culture. Simon Warner examines the interweaving strands, seeded by the poet/novelists Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and others in the 1940s and 1950s, and cultivated by most of the major rock figures who emerged after 1960 - Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Bowie, the Clash and Kurt Cobain, to name just a few. This fascinating cultural history delves into a wide range of issues: Was rock culture the natural heir to the activities of the Beats? Were the hippies the Beats of the 1960s? What attitude did the Beat writers have towards musical forms and particularly rock music? How did literary works shape the consciousness of leading rock music-makers and their followers? Why did Beat literature retain its cultural potency with later rock musicians who rejected hippie values? How did rock musicians use the material of Beat literature in their own work? How did Beat figures become embroiled in the process of rock creativity? These questions are addressed through a number of approaches - the influence of drugs, the relevance of politics, the effect of religious and spiritual pursuits, the rise of the counter-culture, the issue of sub-cultures and their construction, and so on. The result is a highly readable history of the innumerable links between two of the most revolutionary artistic movements of the last 60 years.

Matt Simpson’s poetry has among its principal themes one of coming to terms with the past as a way of understanding the present. In the present collection Simpson continues his journey into his family history. He has also been on other travels: there are poems about Japan, Tasmania, Ireland and the Greek islands of Aegina and Leros. Simpson is not shy of big themes. Here are poems about identity, love, death, illness, friendship. Simpson can be tenderly elegiac as well as celebratory, meditative and also humorous.