The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry

by Robinson, Peter

• ISBN13: 9780198778547
• ISBN10: 0198778546
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2016-12-20
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry offers thirty-eight chapters of ground breaking research that form a collaborative guide to the many groupings and movements, the locations and styles, as well as concerns (aesthetic, political, cultural and ethical) that have helped shape contemporary poetry in Britain and Ireland. The book's introduction offers an anthropological participant-observer approach to its variously conflicted subjects, while exploring the limits and openness of the contemporary as a shifting and never wholly knowable category. The five ensuing sections explore: a history of the period's poetic movements; its engagement with form, technique, and the other arts; its association with particular locations and places; its connection with, and difference from, poetry in other parts of the world; and its circling around such ethical issues as whether poetry can perform actions in the world, can atone, redress, or repair, and how its significance is inseparable from acts of evaluation in both poets and readers. Though the book is not structured to feature chapters on authors thought to be canonical, on the principle that contemporary writers are by definition not yet canonical, the volume contains commentary on many prominent poets, as well as finding space for its contributors' enthusiasms for numerous less familiar figures. It has been organized to be read from cover to cover as an ever deepening exploration of a complex field, to be read in one or more of its five thematically structured sections, or indeed to be read by picking out single chapters or discussions of poets that particularly interest its individual readers.

Author Biography

Peter Robinson is Professor of English and American Literature at the the University of Reading.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Limits and Openness of the Contemporary, Peter Robinson
I. Movements over Time
1. Modernist Survivors, Edward Larrissy
2. The Thirties Bequest, Michael O'Neill
3. The Unburied Past: Walking with Ghosts of the 1940s, Leo Mellor
4. 'Obscure and Doubtful': Stevie Smith, F. T. Prince, and Legacy, William May
5. The Movement: Never and Always, Martin Dodsworth
6. 'In different voices': Modernism since the 1960s, Jeremy Noel-Tod
7. Two Poetries?: A Re-examination of the 'Poetry Divide' in 1970s Britain, Helen Bailey
8. A Dog's Chance: The Evolution of Contemporary Women's Poetry?, Deryn Rees-Jones
9. CAT-scanning the Little Magazine, Richard Price
10. Books and the Market: Trade Publishers, State Subsidies, and Small Presses, Matthew Sperling
II. Senses of Form and Technique
11. 'Space available': A Poet's Decisions, Jeffrey Wainwright
12. Contemporary Poetry and Close Reading, Adam Piette
13. 'All livin language is sacred': Poetry and Varieties of English in these Islands, Simon Dentith
14. Misremembered Lyric and Orphaned Music, Zoe Skoulding
15. 'The degree of power exercised': Recent Ekphrasis, Conor Carville
16. Cinema Mon Amour: How British Poetry Fell in Love with Film, Sophie Mayer
17. Singing Schools and Beyond: The Roles of Creative Writing, Peter Carpenter
III. Poetry in Places
18. Historical and Archaeological: The Poetry of Recovery and Memory, Heather O'Donoghue
19. London, Albion, John Kerrigan
20. The 'London Cut': Poetry and Science, Peter Middleton
21. 'Dafter than we care to own': Some Poets of the North of England, David Wheatley
22. Auden in Ireland, John Redmond
23. 'Other Modes of Being': Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Paul Muldoon, and Translation, Maria Johnston
24. Writing [W]here: Gender and Cultural Positioning in Ireland and Wales, Alice Entwistle
25. The Altered Sublime: Raworth, Crozier, Prynne, Rod Mengham
IV. Border Crossings
26. Dislocating Country: Post-War English Poetry and the Politics of Movement, David Herd
27. Multi-ethnic British Poetries, Omaar Hena
28. European Affinities, Stephen Romer
29. Scottish Poetry in the Wider World, Iain Galbraith
30. The View from the USA, Romana Huk
31. Audience and Awkwardness: Personal Poetry in Britain and New Zealand, Anna Smaill
V. Responsibilities and Values
32. Speech Acts, Responsibility, and Commitment in Poetry, Maximilian de Gaynesforde
33. 'Is a chat with me your fancy?': Address in Contemporary British Poetry, Natalie Pollard
34. 'There Again': Composition, Revision, and Repair, Peter Robinson
35. Reparation, Atonement, and Redress, Piers Pennington
36. Contemporary Poetry and Belief, Michael Symmons Roberts
37. The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Poet, Andrea Brady
38. Contemporary Poetry and Value, Peter Robinson