This thoroughly researched overview on one of the most absorbing literary phenomena of recent decades—the trespassing of cultural and linguistic borders—departs from the canonical point of view offered by the English works of the Nobel laureate, Russian-American poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky, to approach the work of the emerging Hungarian-English poet Ágnes Lehóczky. Through the epistemological filter offered by some guiding texts (such as Bauman, Hall, Braidotti, and many others), this study allows the reader to discover the recounting of a search for an identity, where the adoption of English as an artistic vehicle is only the first thread that unites the two “nomadic” authors. Striving to “locate” language and identity, Brodsky and Lehóczky face the limits of doing so, due to the fluid and nomadic nature of language itself. This suggests, if not answers, then new ways of expression, which draw the language of our future.

What makes a Chinese poem “Chinese”? Some call modern Chinese poetry insufficiently Chinese, saying it is so influenced by foreign texts that it has lost the essence of Chinese culture as known in premodern poetry. Yet that argument overlooks how premodern regulated verse was itself created in imitation of foreign poetics. Looking at Bian Zhilin and Yang Lian in the twentieth century alongside medieval Chinese poets such as Wang Wei, Du Fu, and Li Shangyin, The Organization of Distance applies the notions of foreignization and nativization to Chinese poetry to argue that the impression of poetic Chineseness has long been a product of translation, from forces both abroad and in the past.

In his book Josef Hrdlička opens the question of what exactly constitutes Exile Poetry, and indeed whether it amounts to a category as fundamental as Romantic or Bucolic lyricism. He covers the intricately complex and diverse topic of exile by exploring selected literary texts from antiquity to the present, giving due attention to writers that have influenced the exile discourse; from Ovid, Goethe and Baudelaire to the thinkers and poets of the 20th century like Adorno or Saint-John Perse. Against this backdrop of exile poetics, he turns his attention to Czech poets who left their homeland after the Communist Coup of 1948 and were notable contributors to Czech literature abroad. Hrdlička considers the works of Ivan Blatný, Milada Součková, Ivan Diviš and Petr Král, to show the continuity and changes in the western poetic tradition and expressions of exile.

Speaking the Earth’s Languages brings together for the first time critical discussions of postcolonial poetics from Australia and Chile. The book crosses multiple Languages, landscapes, and disciplines, and draws on a wide range of both oral and written poetries, in order to make strong claims about the importance of ‘a nomad poetics’ – not only for understanding Aboriginal or Mapuche writing practices but, more widely, for the problems confronting contemporary literature and politics in colonized landscapes. The book begins by critiquing canonical examples of non-indigenous postcolonial poetics. Incisive re-readings of two icons of Australian and Chilean poetry, Judith Wright (1915–2000) and Pablo Neruda (1904–1973), provide rich insights into non-indigenous responses to colonization in the wake of modernity. The second half of the book establishes compositional links between Aboriginal and Mapuche poetics, and between such oral and written poetics more generally. The book’s final part develops an ‘emerging synthesis’ of contemporary Aboriginal and Mapuche poetics, with reference to the work of two of the most important avant-garde Aboriginal and Mapuche poets of recent times, Lionel Fogarty (1958–) and Paulo Huirimilla (1973–). Speaking the Earth’s Languages uses these fascinating links between Aboriginal and Mapuche poetics as the basis of a deliberately nomadic, open-ended theory for an Australian–Chilean postcolonial poetics. “The central argument of this book,” the author writes, “is that a nomadic poetics is essential for a genuinely postcolonial form of habitation, or a habitation of colonized landscapes that doesn’t continue to replicate colonialist ideologies involving indigenous dispossession and environmental exploitation.”

Mapping Paradigms in Modern and Contemporary Art defines a new cartographic aesthetic, or what Simonetta Moro calls carto-aesthetics, as a key to interpreting specific phenomena in modern and contemporary art, through the concept of poetic cartography. The problem of mapping, although indebted to the "spatial turn" of poststructuralist philosophy, is reconstructed as hermeneutics, while exposing the nexus between topology, space-time, and memory. The book posits that the emergence of "mapping" as a ubiquitous theme in contemporary art can be attributed to the power of the cartographic model to constitute multiple worldviews that can be seen as paradigmatic of the post-modern and contemporary condition. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in art history, art theory, aesthetics, and cartography.

Ideas of home, place and identity have been continually questioned, re-imagined and re-constructed in Northern Irish poetry. Concentrating on the period since the outbreak of the Troubles in the late 1960s, this study provides a detailed consideration of the work of several generations of poets, from Hewitt and MacNeice, to Fiacc and Montague, to Simmons, Heaney, Mahon and Longley, to Muldoon, Carson, Paulin and McGuckian, to McDonald, Morrissey, Gillis and Flynn. It traces the extent to which their writing represents a move away from concepts of rootedness and towards a deterritorialized poetics of displacement, mobility, openness and pluralism in an era of accelerating migration and globalisation. In the new readings of place, inherited maps are no longer reliable, and home is no longer the stable ground of identity but seems instead to be always where it is not. The crossing of boundaries and the experience of diaspora open up new understandings of the relations between places, a new sense of the permeability and contingency of cultures, and new concepts of identity and home. Professor ELMER KENNEDY-ANDREWS teaches in the Department of English at the University of Ulster.

Powerful essays on the state and aims of contemporary poetry.