The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry

by Edited by Matthew Campbell

• ISBN13: 9780521813013
• ISBN10: 0521813018
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780511221538
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-09-08
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• More Book Details

Summary

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, 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.

Table of Contents

Notes on contributors	vii
Preface	x
Chronology	xiii
1 Ireland in poetry: 1999, 1949, 1969	1	(20)
MATTHEW CAMPBELL
2 From Irish mode to modernisation: the poetry of Austin Clarke	21	(21)
JOHN GOODBY
3 Patrick Kavanagh and antipastoral	42	(17)
JONATHAN ALLISON
4 Louis MacNeice: irony and responsibility	59	(17)
PETER McDONALD
5 The Irish modernists and their legacy	76	(18)
ALEX DAVIS
6 Poetry of the 1960's: the 'Northern Ireland Renaissance'	94	(19)
FRALA BREARTON
7 Violence in Seamus Heaney's poetry	113	(20)
DILLON JOHNSTON
8 Mahon and Longley: place and placelessness	133	(16)
TERENCE BROWN
9 Between two languages: poetry in Irish, English and Irish English	149	(20)
FRANK SEWELL
10 Boland, McGuckian, Ni Chuilleanáin and the body of the nation	169	(20)
GUINN BATTEN
11 Sonnets, centos and long lines: Muldoon, Paulin, McGuckian and Carson	189	(20)
SHANE MURPHY
12 Performance and dissent: Irish poets in the public sphere	209	(20)
LUCY COLLINS
13 Irish poets and the world	229	(21)
ROBERT FAGGEN
14 Irish poetry into the twenty-first century	250	(18)
DAVID WHEATLEY
Further reading	268	(17)
Index	285