In this incisive and highly readable study, Rachel Buxton offers a much-needed assessment of Frost's significance for Northern Irish poetry of the past half-century. Drawing upon a diverse range of previously unpublished archival sources, including juvenilia, correspondence, and drafts of poems, Robert Frost and Northern Irish Poetry takes as its particular focus the triangular dynamic of Frost, Seamus Heaney, and Paul Muldoon. Buxton explores the differing strengths which each Irish poet finds in Frost's work: while Heaney is drawn primarily to the Frost persona and to the "sound of sense", it is the studied slyness and wryness of the American's poetry, the complicating undertow, which Muldoon values. This appraisal of Frost in a non-American context not only enables a fuller appreciation of Heaney's and Muldoon's poetry but also provides valuable insight into the nature of trans-national and trans-generational poetic influence. Engaging with the politics of Irish-American literary connections, while providing a subtle analysis of the intertextual relationships between these three key twentieth-century poets, Robert Frost and Northern Irish Poetry is a pioneering work.

In this incisive and highly readable study, Rachel Buxton offers a much-needed assessment of Frost's significance for Northern Irish poetry of the past half-century. Drawing upon a diverse range of previously unpublished archival sources, including juvenilia, correspondence, and drafts of poems, Robert Frost and Northern Irish Poetry takes as its particular focus the triangular dynamic of Frost, Seamus Heaney, and Paul Muldoon. Buxton explores the differing strengths which eachIrish poet finds in Frost's work: while Heaney is drawn primarily to the Frost persona and to the "sound of sense", it is the studied slyness and wryness of the American's poetry, the complicating undertow, which Muldoon values. This appraisal of Frost in a non-American context not only enables a fullerappreciation of Heaney's and Muldoon's poetry but also provides valuable insight into the nature of trans-national and trans-generational poetic influence. Engaging with the politics of Irish-American literary connections, while providing a subtle analysis of the intertextual relationships between these three key twentieth-century poets, Robert Frost and Northern Irish Poetry is a pioneering work.

Through discussion of the ways in which major Northern Irish poets (such as John Hewitt, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Louis MacNeice and Derek Mahon) have been influenced by America, this study shows how Northern Irish poetry overspills national borders, complicating and enriching itself through cross-cultural interaction and hybridity.

In Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition, Donna L. Potts closely examines the pastoral genre in the work of six Irish poets writing today. Through the exploration of the poets and their works, she reveals the wide range of purposes that pastoral has served in both Northern Ireland and the Republic: a postcolonial critique of British imperialism; a response to modernity, industrialization, and globalization; a way of uncovering political and social repercussions of gendered representations of Ireland; and, more recently, a means for conveying environmentalism’s more complex understanding of the value of nature. Potts traces the pastoral back to its origins in the work of Theocritus of Syracuse in the third century and plots its evolution due to cultural changes. While all pastoral poems share certain generic traits, Potts makes clear that pastorals are shaped by social and historical contexts, and Irish pastorals in particular were influenced by Ireland’s unique relationship with the land, language, and industrialization due to England’s colonization. For her discussion, Potts has chosen six poets who have written significant collections of pastoral poetry and whose work is in dialogue with both the pastoral tradition and other contemporary pastoral poets. Three poets are men—John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley—while three are women—Eavan Boland, Medbh McGuckian, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Five are English-language authors, while the sixth—Ní Dhomhnaill—writes in Irish. Additionally, some of the poets hail from the Republic, while others originate from Northern Ireland. Potts contends that while both Irish Republic and Northern Irish poets respond to a shared history of British colonization in their pastorals, the 1921 partition of the country caused the pastoral tradition to evolve differently on either side of the border, primarily because of the North’s more rapid industrialization; its more heavily Protestant population, whose response to environmentalism was somewhat different than that of the Republic’s predominantly Catholic population; as well the greater impact of the world wars and the Irish Troubles. In an important distinction from other studies of Irish poetry, Potts moves beyond the influence of history and politics on contemporary Irish pastoral poetry to consider the relatively recent influence of ecology. Contemporary Irish poets often rely on the motif of the pastoral retreat to highlight various environmental threats to those retreats—whether they be high-rises, motorways, global warming, or acid rain. Potts concludes by speculating on the future of pastoral in contemporary Irish poetry through her examination of more recent poets—including Moya Cannon and Paula Meehan—as well as other genres such as film, drama, and fiction.

Constitutions of Self in Contemporary Irish Poetry explores the figure of the lyrical self in the work of six contemporary Irish poets: Paul Muldoon, Vona Groarke, Sinéad Morrissey, Caitríona O’Reilly, Alan Gillis and Nick Laird. By focusing on the self, this study offers the first sustained exploration of what is arguably one of the most distinctive features of Irish poetry. Readings utilise the latest theories of the lyric filtered through the work of such philosophers as Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Slavoj Žižek, Giorgio Agamben and Zygmunt Bauman, and connect an interdisciplinary approach with attention to the operations of the poetic text to bring out aspects of the self in Irish writing that have been given only cursory critical attention so far.

The Poetry of Paul Muldoon introduces the student and general reader to the critical discussion surrounding Muldoon’s oeuvre, as well as to his major themes. It examines the poet’s meditations on culture and nature, human and animal, speculations on the act of perception, figures fragmented by the Troubles, and philosophical considerations of colonisation. It then discusses what rank among the most beautiful and intricate elegies of our time. For Muldoon, art’s complicity in suffering is a political, self-indicting question, which his best poems endeavour to answer. If sometimes this Pulitzer Prize winner insists that art has a positive role to play, at other times he fears that it merely feeds off the carnage. This critical book shows how, for Muldoon, art should not merely repeat the devastation of the world - although he is afraid that it does, and engages in bitter moral despair that places his work among the very best any contemporary poet has written. The Poetry of Paul Muldoon unearths difficult questions of form with a metaphysical significance that is suitable to our times.

This book examines the influence of American poetry on Seamus Heaney’s achievement by close attention to the themes, style, and resonances of his poetry at different stages of his career, including his appointments in Berkeley and Harvard. Beginning with an examination of Heaney’s education at Queen’s University, this study presents comparative close readings which explore the influence of five American poets he read during this period: Robert Frost, John Crowe Ransom, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Bishop. Laverty demonstrates how Heaney returned to several of these poets in response to difficulty and to consolidate later aesthetic developments. Heaney’s ambivalent critical treatment of Sylvia Plath is investigated, as is his partial misreading of Bishop, who is understood today more sensitively than in her lifetime. This study also probes the reasons for his elision of other prominent American writers, making this the first comprehensive assessment of American influence on Heaney’s poetry.

Ideas of home, place and identity have been continually questioned, re-imagined and re-constructed in Northern Irish poetry. Concentrating on the period since the outbreak of the Troubles in the late 1960s, this study provides a detailed consideration of the work of several generations of poets, from Hewitt and MacNeice, to Fiacc and Montague, to Simmons, Heaney, Mahon and Longley, to Muldoon, Carson, Paulin and McGuckian, to McDonald, Morrissey, Gillis and Flynn. It traces the extent to which their writing represents a move away from concepts of rootedness and towards a deterritorialized poetics of displacement, mobility, openness and pluralism in an era of accelerating migration and globalisation. In the new readings of place, inherited maps are no longer reliable, and home is no longer the stable ground of identity but seems instead to be always where it is not. The crossing of boundaries and the experience of diaspora open up new understandings of the relations between places, a new sense of the permeability and contingency of cultures, and new concepts of identity and home. Professor ELMER KENNEDY-ANDREWS teaches in the Department of English at the University of Ulster.

What are the means available to poetry to address crisis and how can both poets and critics meet the conflicts and challenges they face? This collection of essays addresses poetic and critical responses to the various crises encountered by contemporary writers and our society, from the Holocaust to the ecological crisis.

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, but also introduces the reader to significant precursors like Louis MacNeice or Patrick Kavanagh, and vital contemporaries and successors: among others, Thomas Kinsella, Paul Muldoon and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. 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, the only book of its kind on the market, 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.