In this important prose work, one of our major poets explores, through autobiography and argument, a woman's life in Ireland together with a poet's work. Eavan Boland beautifully uncovers the powerful drama of how these lives affect one another; how the tradition of womanhood and the historic vocation of the poet act as revealing illuminations of the other.
Eavan Boland beautifully uncovers the powerful drama of how these lives affect one another; how the tradition of womanhood and the historic vocation of the poet act as revealing illuminations of the other.
Limits and Languages in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry examines the transactions between the two main languages of Irish literature, English and Irish, and their formative role in contemporary poetry by Irish women. Daniela Theinová explores the works of well-known poets such as Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Biddy Jenkinson and Medbh McGuckian, combining for the first time a critical analysis of the language issue with a focus on the historical marginality of women in the Irish literary tradition. Acutely alert to the textures of individual poems even as she reads these against broader critical-theoretical horizons, Theinová engages directly with texts in both Irish and English. By highlighting these writers’ uneasy poetic and linguistic identity, and by introducing into this wider context some more recent poets—including Vona Groarke, Caitríona O’Reilly, Sinéad Morrissey, Ailbhe Darcy and Aifric Mac Aodha—this book proposes a fundamental critical reconsideration of major late-twentieth-century Irish women poets, and, by extension, the nation’s canon.
'On Form' assesses both the legacy of Victorian aestheticism and the nature of the literary. It tracks the development of the world 'form' since the Romantics and offers readings of, among others, Tennyson, Yeats and Plath. Original readings of poetry are combined with a powerful argument about the nature of aesthetic pleasure.
Now in its third edition Poetry: The Basics remains an engaging exploration of the world of poetry. Drawing on examples ranging from Chaucer to children's rhymes, Cole Porter to Carol Ann Duffy, and from around the English-speaking world, it shows how any reader can understand and gain more pleasure from poetry. Exploring poetry’s relationship to everyday language and introducing major genres and technical aspects in an accessible way, it is a clear introduction to how different types of poetry work through the study of details and of whole poems. With a revised chapter on the different practices and ideas in the writing of poetry now, including sections on film poetry and digital poetics, this is a must read for all students of English Literature.
Defying critical suggestions that the pastoral elegy is obsolete, Iain Twiddy reveals the popularity of the form in the work of major contemporary poets Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and Paul Muldoon, Michael Longley, Douglas Dunn and Peter Reading. As Twiddy outlines the development of the form, he identifies its characteristics and functions. But more importantly his study accounts for the enduring appeal of the pastoral elegy, why poets look to its conventions during times of personal distress and social disharmony, and how it allows them to recover from grief, loss and destruction. Informed by current debates and contemporary theories of mourning, Twiddy discusses themes of war and peace, social pastoral and environmental change, draws on the enduring influence of both Classical and Romantic poetics and explores poets' changing relationships with pastoral elegy throughout their careers. The result is a study that demonstrates why the pastoral elegy is still a flourishing and dynamic form in contemporary British and Irish poetry.
Sarah Broom provides an engaging, challenging and lively introduction to contemporary British and Irish poetry. The book covers work by poets from a wide range of ethnic and regional backgrounds and covers a broad range of poetic styles, including mainstream names like Seamus Heaney and Carol Ann Duffy alongside more marginal and experimental poets like Tom Raworth and Geraldine Monk. Contemporary British and Irish Poetry tackles the most compelling and contentious issues facing poetry today.
In this powerful and authoritative study Jody Allen Randolph providesthe fullest account yet of the work of a major figure in twentieth-century Irish literature as well as in contemporary women’s writing. Eavan Boland’s achievement in changing the map of Irish poetry is tracked and analyzed from her first poems to the present. The book traces the evolution of that achievement, guiding the reader through Boland’s early attachment to Yeats, her growing unease with the absence of women’s writing, her encounter with pioneering American poets like Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, and Adrienne Rich, and her eventual, challenging amendments in poetry and prose to Ireland’s poetic tradition. Using research from private papers the book also traces a time of upheaval and change in Ireland, exploring Boland's connection to Mary Robinson, in a chapter that details the nexus of a woman president and a woman poet in a country that was resistant to both. Finally, this book invites the reader to share a compelling perspective on the growth of a poet described by one critic as Ireland’s “first great woman poet.”
This original study is the first major critical appraisal of Ireland’s post-colonial experience in relation to that of other emergent nations. The parallels between Ireland, India, Latin America, Africa and Europe establish bridges in literary and musical contexts which offer a unique insight into independence and freedom, and the ways in which they are articulated by emergent nations. They explore the master-servant relationship, the functions of narrative, and the concepts of nationalism, map-making, exile, schizophrenia, hybridity, magical realism and disillusion. The author offers many incisive answers to the question: What happens to an emerging nation after it has emerged?
