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Activist Poetics: Anarchy in the Avon Valley

John Kinsella

Niall Lucy (ed.)

John Kinsella is known internationally as the acclaimed author of more than thirty books of poetry and prose, but in tandem with — and often directly through — his creative and critical work, ... More

John Kinsella is known internationally as the acclaimed author of more than thirty books of poetry and prose, but in tandem with — and often directly through — his creative and critical work, Kinsella is also a prominent activist. In this book the vegan anarchist pacifist poet claims that poetry can act as a vital form of resistance to a variety of social and ethical ills, in particular ecological damage and abuse. Kinsella builds on his earlier notion of ‘linguistic disobedience’ evolving out of civil disobedience, and critiques the figurative qualities of his poems in a context of resistance. The book includes explorations of anarchism, veganism, pacifism and ecological poetics. For Kinsella all poetry is political and can be a call to action.Less

The Alvarez Generation: Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter

William Wootten

This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as ... More

This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as Philip Larkin, a generation who would, in the words of the introduction to A. Alvarez's classic anthology The New Poetry, take poetry ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’. This was the generation of Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter. This book explores what these five poets shared in common, their connections, critical reception, rivalries, and differences, and locates what was new and valuable in their work. The book presents an important re-evaluation of a time when contemporary poetry and its criticism had a cultural weight it has now lost and when a ‘new seriousness’ was to become closely linked to questions of violence, psychic unbalance and, most controversially of all, suicide.Less

Avant-Folk: Small Press Poetry Networks from 1950 to the Present

Ross Hair

Avant-Folk is the first comprehensive study of a loose collective of important British and American poets, publishers, and artists (including Lorine Niedecker, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Jonathan ... More

Avant-Folk is the first comprehensive study of a loose collective of important British and American poets, publishers, and artists (including Lorine Niedecker, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Jonathan Williams) and the intersection of folk and modernist, concrete and lyric poetics within the small press poetry networks that developed around these figures from the 1950s up to the present day. This book argues that the merging of the demotic with the avant-garde is but one of the many consequences of a particularly vibrant period of creative exchange when this network of poets, publishers, and artists expanded considerably the possibilities of small press publishing. Avant-Folk explores how, from this still largely unexplored body of work, emerge new critical relations to place, space, and locale. Paying close attention to the transmission of demotic cultural expressions, this study of small press poetry networks also revises current assessments regarding the relationship between the cosmopolitan and the regional and between avant-garde and vernacular, folk aesthetics. Readers of Avant-Folk will gain an understanding of how small press publishing practices have revised these familiar terms and how they reconceive the broader field of twentieth-century British and American poetry.Less

Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland

Greg Thomas

This book presents the first in-depth account of the relationship between English and Scottish poets and the international concrete poetry movement of the 1950s-70s. Concrete poetry was a literary ... More

This book presents the first in-depth account of the relationship between English and Scottish poets and the international concrete poetry movement of the 1950s-70s. Concrete poetry was a literary and artistic style which reactivated early-twentieth-century modernist impulses towards the merging of artistic media while simultaneously speaking to a gamut of contemporary contexts, from post-1945 social reconstruction to cybernetics, mass media, and the sixties counter-culture. The terms of its development in England and Scotland also suggest new ways of mapping ongoing complexities in the relationship between those two national cultures, and of tracing broader sociological and cultural trends in Britain during the 1960s-70s. Focusing especially on the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Edwin Morgan, Dom Sylvester Houédard, and Bob Cobbing, Border Blurs is based on new and extensive archival and primary research. It fills a gap in contemporary understandings of a significant literary and artistic genre which has been largely overlooked by literary critics. It also sheds new light on the development of British and Scottish literature during the late twentieth century, on the emergence of intermedia art, and on the development of modernism beyond its early-twentieth-century, urban Western networks.Less

Ciaran Carson: Space, Place, Writing

Neal Alexander

Ciaran Carson is one of the most challenging and inventive of contemporary Irish writers, exhibiting verbal brilliance, formal complexity and intellectual daring across a remarkably varied body of ... More

Ciaran Carson is one of the most challenging and inventive of contemporary Irish writers, exhibiting verbal brilliance, formal complexity and intellectual daring across a remarkably varied body of work. This study considers the full range of his oeuvre, in poetry, prose and translations, and discusses the major themes to which he returns, including: memory and history, narrative, language and translation, mapping, violence and power. It argues that the singularity of Carson's writing is to be found in his radical imaginative engagements with ideas of space and place. The city of Belfast, in particular, occupies a crucially important place in his texts, serving as an imaginative focal point around which his many other concerns are constellated. The city, in all its volatile mutability, is an abiding frame of reference and a reservoir of creative impetus for Carson's imagination. Accordingly, the book adopts an interdisciplinary approach that draws upon geography, urbanism, and cultural theory as well as literary criticism.Less

The Common Spring: Essays on Latin and English Poetry

Niall Rudd

This collection aims to bring out the continuity between major poets in Latin and English, presenting to a wider audience papers previously published only in academic periodicals along with a number ... More

This collection aims to bring out the continuity between major poets in Latin and English, presenting to a wider audience papers previously published only in academic periodicals along with a number of unpublished pieces. It contains essays on Virgil, Horace, Ovid and Juvenal, which are intended for the reader with a genuine but not necessarily specialised interest in Latin poetry. Corresponding papers on English poets, including Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Swift and Tennyson, emphasise the debt owed to their Roman predecessors. Two more general pieces, on the poetry of romantic love and on classical humanism, further underline the continuity between past and present. It is a collection of essays written over a period of time (1996-2000), some previously published, but collected here for the first time with some new piecesLess

Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Memory and Estrangement

Lucy Collins

This book examines the intersection of private and public spheres through the representation of memory in contemporary poetry by Irish women. It explores how memory shapes creativity in the work of ... More

This book examines the intersection of private and public spheres through the representation of memory in contemporary poetry by Irish women. It explores how memory shapes creativity in the work of well-known poets such as Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Medbh McGuckian as well as in that of an exciting group of younger poets. Literary memory highlights the relationship between poet and reader, as well as the larger critical contexts that support or challenge the production of creative work. This book analyses, for the first time, the complex responses to the past recorded by contemporary women poets in Ireland and the implications these have for the concept of a national tradition.Less

Edward Dowden: A Critical Edition of the Complete Poetry

Wayne Chapman (ed.)

This edition makes available the complete poetic works of Irish poet Edward Dowden, whose writings were influential at the turn of the twentieth century. With the addition of “Miscellaneous Poems of ... More

This edition makes available the complete poetic works of Irish poet Edward Dowden, whose writings were influential at the turn of the twentieth century. With the addition of “Miscellaneous Poems of Later Dates” in 1914, Mrs. Dowden preserved the order of her husband's early work but imposed a partly chronological arrangement on that and future editions of his verse. She was ambitious to revive Dowden's reputation as a poet. The present edition is quasi-chronological: being strictly chronological in a tripartite divisional arrangement (“from Poems,” “Miscellaneous Poems of Later Dates,” and “A Woman's Reliquary”) followed by a short section entitled “Uncollected Verses,” while maintaining sequences the poet designed. The division of “Uncollected Verses” is chronological according to the dates of publication, and this section is small because Mrs. Dowden had laid her hands on almost all of the already published poetry, save for that of a more ephemeral nature.Less

Edward Lear

James Williams

Edward Lear wrote a well-known autobiographical poem that begins “How pleasant to know Mr Lear!” But how well do we really know him? On the one hand he is, in John Ashbery’s words, “one of the most ... More

Edward Lear wrote a well-known autobiographical poem that begins “How pleasant to know Mr Lear!” But how well do we really know him? On the one hand he is, in John Ashbery’s words, “one of the most popular poets who ever lived”; on the other hand he has often been overlooked or marginalized by scholars and in literary histories. This book, the first full length critical study of the poet since the 1980s, sets out to re-introduce Lear and to accord him his proper place: as a major Victorian figure of continuing appeal and relevance, and especially as a poet of beauty, comedy, and profound ingenuity. It approaches Lear’s work thematically, tracing some of its most fundamental subjects and situations. Grounded in attentive close readings, it connects Lear’s nonsense poetry with his various other creative endeavours: as a zoological illustrator and landscape painter, a travel writer, and a prolific diarist and correspondent.Less

Frank O'Hara Now: New Essays on the New York Poet

Robert Hampson and Will Montgomery (eds)

Frank O'Hara's writing is central to any consideration of twentieth-century American poetry. This book asks why O'Hara remains so important to twenty-first-century readers and writers of poetry. The ... More

Frank O'Hara's writing is central to any consideration of twentieth-century American poetry. This book asks why O'Hara remains so important to twenty-first-century readers and writers of poetry. The book is transatlantic in tone, combining American scholarship with a wide sampling of British writers. For many, O'Hara's distinctive appeal depends on his witty depictions of urban experience, his relationship to the painters of Abstract Expressionism and the exhilarating immediacy of his poetic voice. Yet these chatty and approachable qualities coexist with a testing engagement with currents in European and American modernism. This book offers a comprehensive picture of the poet, presenting the conversational insouciance of the writing alongside its more intransigent features.Less

A Gallery to Play to: The Story of the Mersey Poets

Phil Bowen

This book is an intimate account of the lives and careers of the so-called Mersey Poets – Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, and Brian Patten – with unparalleled access to whom, the author has written an ... More

This book is an intimate account of the lives and careers of the so-called Mersey Poets – Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, and Brian Patten – with unparalleled access to whom, the author has written an indispensable book for anyone interested in poetry, popular culture, and society over the last forty years.Less

Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara: Difference, Homosexuality, Topography

Hazel Smith

Frank O'Hara's poetry evokes a specific era and location: New York in the fifties and early sixties. This is a pre-computer age of typewritten manuscripts, small shops, and lunch hours: it is also an ... More

Frank O'Hara's poetry evokes a specific era and location: New York in the fifties and early sixties. This is a pre-computer age of typewritten manuscripts, small shops, and lunch hours: it is also an age of gay repression, accelerating consumerism, and race riots. The author suggests that the location and dislocation of the cityscape creates ‘hyperscapes’ in the poetry of O'Hara. The hyperscape is a postmodern site characterised by difference, breaking down unified concepts of text, city, subject, and art, and remolding them into new textual, subjective, and political spaces. This book theorises the process of disruption and re-figuration that constitutes the hyperscape, and celebrates its radicality.Less

Interdisciplinary/Multidisciplinary Woolf

Ann Martin and Kathryn Holland (eds)

This book comprises thirty-five chapters selected from papers delivered at the 22nd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, hosted by the University of Saskatchewan. Chapters link inter- ... More

This book comprises thirty-five chapters selected from papers delivered at the 22nd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, hosted by the University of Saskatchewan. Chapters link inter- and multidisciplinary scholarship to the intellectual and creative projects of Woolf and her modernist peers. Text that identifies and extends points of contact between literary studies and varied disciplines are arranged in four thematic sections covering history, materiality, and multiplicity; patterns, practices, and principles; art, influence, and embodiment; and publishing politics, and publics.Less

Keats's Negative Capability: New Origins and Afterlives

Brian Rejack and Michael Theune (eds)

In late December 1817, when attempting to name ‘what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature’, John Keats coined the term ‘negative capability’, which he glossed as ‘being ... More

In late December 1817, when attempting to name ‘what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature’, John Keats coined the term ‘negative capability’, which he glossed as ‘being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’. Since then negative capability has continued to shape assessments of and responses to Keats’s work, while also surfacing in other contexts ranging from contemporary poetry to punk rock. The essays collected in this volume, taken as a whole, account for some of the history of negative capability, and propose new models and directions for its future in scholarly and popular discourse. The book does not propose a particular understanding of negative capability from among the many options (radical empathy, annihilation of self, philosophical skepticism, celebration of ambiguity) as the final word on the topic; rather, the book accounts for the multidimensionality of negative capability. Essays treat negative capability’s relation to topics including the Christmas pantomime, psychoanalysis, Zen Buddhism, nineteenth-century medicine, and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Describing the ‘poetical Character’ Keats notes that ‘it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated’. This book, too, revels in such multiplicity.Less

The Laughter of Foxes: A Study of Ted Hughes

Keith Sagar

A literary figure often overshadowed by his famed wife, Sylvia Plath, and their troubled marriage, Ted Hughes was a brilliant poet in his own right who wrote some of the most important British poetry ... More

A literary figure often overshadowed by his famed wife, Sylvia Plath, and their troubled marriage, Ted Hughes was a brilliant poet in his own right who wrote some of the most important British poetry of the twentieth century. This book probes all aspects of the poet's life and work, delving into the specifics of his life as revealed by his writings and correspondence. A wide array of topics — including the mythic imagination, the poetic relationship between Plath and Hughes, and a detailed analysis of Hughes' poem ‘A Dove Came’ through its evolving drafts — reveals fascinating new avenues of literary and biographical analysis in Hughes' work. Augmenting the rich text in this edition are excerpts of letters from Hughes to the author of this book, a detailed chronology of Hughes' life by Ann Skea, and the first publication of the story ‘Crow’.Less

Liberty and Poetic Licence: New Essays on Byron

Bernard Beatty, Tony Howe, and Charles Robinson

This book enters new territory in Byron studies. The volume runs chronologically from the earliest of Byron's productions, through those of his early maturity, to those of his fullest development. It ... More

This book enters new territory in Byron studies. The volume runs chronologically from the earliest of Byron's productions, through those of his early maturity, to those of his fullest development. It covers his output in both poetry and prose, and considers many works that do not generally claim, or have not generally claimed serious critical attention. The general theme running throughout the collection is that of ‘freedom’, with particular chapter looking at grammar; geology; animal rights; literary, religious and intercontinental influences; poet-publisher relations; and morality.Less

The Life and Poems of Anne Hunter Haydn's Tuneful Voice

Caroline Grigson

Anne Home Hunter (1741–1821) was one of the most successful song writers of the second half of the eighteenth century, most famously as the poet who wrote the lyrics of many of Haydn's songs. ... More

Anne Home Hunter (1741–1821) was one of the most successful song writers of the second half of the eighteenth century, most famously as the poet who wrote the lyrics of many of Haydn's songs. However, her work, which included many more serious, lyrical and romantic poems, has been largely forgotten. This book contains over 200 poems, some published in Hunter's lifetime under her married name ‘Mrs John Hunter’, some attributed only to ‘a Lady’, and most importantly, many transcribed from her manuscripts, housed in various archives and in a private collection, which are now collected for the first time. Hitherto Anne Hunter has been known almost entirely through her Poems published in 1802. In her Introduction the author argues that Hunter saw this book as a definitive representation of her poetry. Besides Hunter's consummately skilful lyrics and songs, Poems contains serious political odes and reflective poems. The unpublished material amplifies and extends the work of 1802. The Introduction is followed by a long biographical essay. The daughter of Robert Home, an impoverished Scottish Army surgeon, Anne Hunter spent her adult life in London, where she married the famous anatomist John Hunter, with whom she lived in great style, latterly as a bluestocking hostess, until his death in 1793. The book includes many new details of her long life, including her friendships with Angelica Kaufman (who painted her portrait) and with the bluestocking Elizabeth Carter. The account of Anne's life as a widow describes her relationships with her family and friends.Less