Modern Irish and Scottish Poetry

by Edited by Peter Mackay , Edna Longley , Fran Brearton

• ISBN13: 9780521196024
• ISBN10: 0521196027
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-05-09
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The comparative study of the literatures of Ireland and Scotland has emerged as a distinct and buoyant field in recent years. This collection of new essays offers the first sustained comparison of modern Irish and Scottish poetry, featuring close readings of texts within broad historical and political contextualization. Playing on influences, crossovers, connections, disconnections and differences, the 'affinities' and 'opposites' traced in this book cross both Irish and Scottish poetry in many directions. Contributors include major scholars of the new 'archipelagic' approach, as well as leading Irish and Scottish poets providing important insights into current creative practice. Poets discussed include W. B. Yeats, Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley MacLean, Louis MacNeice, Edwin Morgan, Douglas Dunn, Seamus Heaney, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Michael Longley, Medbh McGuckian, Nuala ni Dhomhnaill, Don Paterson and Kathleen Jamie. This book is a major contribution to our understanding of poetry from these islands in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Swordsmen:

Tradition and the individual editor: Professor Grierson, modernism and national poetics

Louis MacNeice among the islands

Townland, desert, cave: Irish and Scottish Second World War poetry

Affinities in time and space: reading the Gaelic poetry of Ireland and Scotland

Contemporary affinities

The classics in modern Scottish and Irish poetry

Translating Beowulf

Reading in the gutters

'What matters is the yeast': 'foreignising' Gaelic poetry

Outside English: Irish and Scottish poets in the East

Names for nameless things: the poetics of place names

Desire lines: mapping the city in contemporary Belfast and Glasgow poetry

'The ugly burds without wings'?: Reactions to tradition since the 1960s

'And cannot say/and cannot say': Richard Price, Randolph Healy and the Dialogue of the Deaf

On 'The Friendship of Young Poets'

'No misprints in this work': the poetic 'translations' of Medbh McGuckian and Frank Kuppner

Phoenix or dead crow? Irish and Scottish poetry magazines 1945-2000

Out with the pale: Irish-Scottish studies as an act of translation

Further reading

Index

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