This book is the first comparative work of its kind to provide an extended analysis of the contribution of Kamau Brathwaite and Christopher Okigbo. It considers the poetic works of these two artists as they responded to the transformations taking place within Africa and the Caribbean during the Independence period. Some of the issues discussed include: politics and art, religion, spirituality, traditional culture versus popular culture, language and identity, literature and orality, cyber-culture and identity. This book highlights some of the similarities and differences in the life and work of these two poets and examines various aspects of their style. It provides a clearer understanding of the stances these artists took on crucial issues that would shape the face of their respective societies way beyond the Independence period.

Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature reveals an intriguing history of relationships among poets and editors from Ireland and Nigeria, as well as Britain and the Caribbean, during the mid-twentieth-century era of decolonization. The book explores what such leading anglophone poets as Seamus Heaney, Christopher Okigbo, and Derek Walcott had in common: 'peripheral' origins and a desire to address transnational publics without expatriating themselves. The book reconstructs how they gained the imprimatur of both local and London-based cultural institutions. It shows, furthermore, how political crises challenged them to reconsider their poetry's publics. Making substantial use of unpublished archival material, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma examines poems in print, often the pages on which they first appeared, in order to chart the transformation of the anglophone literary world. He argues that these poets' achievements cannot be extricated from the transnational networks through which their poems circulated - and which they in turn remade.

A COMPANION TO MODERNIST POETRY A Companion to Modernist Poetry A Companion to Modernist Poetry presents contemporary approaches to modernist poetry in a uniquely in-depth and accessible text. The first section of the volume reflects the attention to historical and cultural context that has been especially fruitful in recent scholarship. The second section focuses on various movements and groupings of poets, placing writers in literary history and indicating the currents and countercurrents whose interaction generated the category of modernism as it is now broadly conceived. The third section traces the arcs of twenty-one poets’ careers, illustrated by analyses of key works. The Companion thus offers breadth in its presentation of historical and literary contexts and depth in its attention to individual poets; it brings recent scholarship to bear on the subject of modernist poetry while also providing guidance on poets who are historically important and who are likely to appear on syllabi and to attract critical interest for many years to come. Edited by two highly respected and notable critics in the field, A Companion to Modernist Poetry boasts a varied list of contributors who have produced an intense, focused study of modernist poetry.

‘Key to understanding Black British history’ – The Sunday Times ‘Sharp and still relevant’ – Zadie Smith One of the great poets of modern times, and a deeply respected political and cultural activist and social critic, Linton Kwesi Johnson is also a prolific writer of non-fiction. In Time Come, he selects some of his most powerful prose – book and music reviews published in newspapers and magazines, lectures, obituaries and speeches – for the first time. Written over many decades, these works draw on Johnson’s own Jamaican roots and on Caribbean history to explore the politics of race that continue to inform the Black British experience. Ranging from reflections on the place of music in Caribbean and Black British culture as a creative, defiant response to oppression, to penetrating appraisals of novels, films, poems and plays, and including warm tributes paid to the activists and artists who inspired him to contribute to the struggle for racial equality and social justice, Time Come is a panorama of an exceptional life. Venturing into memoir, it underscores Johnson’s enduring importance in Britain’s cultural history and reminds us of his brilliant, unparalleled legacy. With an introduction by Paul Gilroy, author of There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. ‘A mosaic of wise, urgent and moving pieces’ – Kit de Waal ‘As necessary as ever’ – The Observer ‘A book to be savoured and re-read’ – Derek Owusu ‘An outstanding collection’ – Caryl Phillips ‘A necessary book from a writer who continues to inspire’ – Yomi Sode ‘Incisive, engaging, fearless’ – Gary Younge

The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry is the first collection of essays to explore postcolonial poetry through regional, historical, political, formal, textual, gender, and comparative approaches. The essays encompass a broad range of English-speakers from the Caribbean, Africa, South Asia, and the Pacific Islands; the former settler colonies, such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, especially non-Europeans; Ireland, Britain's oldest colony; and postcolonial Britain itself, particularly black and Asian immigrants and their descendants. The comparative essays analyze poetry from across the postcolonial anglophone world in relation to postcolonialism and modernism, fixed and free forms, experimentation, oral performance and creole languages, protest poetry, the poetic mapping of urban and rural spaces, poetic embodiments of sexuality and gender, poetry and publishing history, and poetry's response to, and reimagining of, globalization. Strengthening the place of poetry in postcolonial studies, this Companion also contributes to the globalization of poetry studies.

Offers a critical history of African American poetry from the transatlantic slave trade to present day hip-hop.

The Cambridge Introduction to British Poetry, 1945–2010 provides a broad overview of an important body of poetry from England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland from the postwar period through to the twenty-first century. It offers a comprehensive view of the historical context surrounding the poetry and provides in-depth readings of many of the period's central poets. British poetry after 1945 has been given much less attention than both earlier British and American poetry, as well as postwar American poetry. There are very few single-author studies that present the entirety of the period's poetry. This book is unique for the comprehensive richness with which it presents the historical and literary-historical scene, as well as for its close-up focus on a wide range of major poets and poems.

The Edinburgh Companion, newly available in paperback, is a gateway to the fascinating worlds of ancient Greece and Rome. Wide-ranging in its approach, it demonstrates the multifaceted nature of classical civilisation and enables readers to gain guidance in drawing together the perspectives and methods of different disciplines, from philosophy to history, from poetry to archaeology, from art history to numismatics, and many more.

'A profoundly valuable collection, full of fresh perspective, and opening doors into all kinds of material that has been routinely neglected or patronized' Rowan Williams, TLS This rich and surprising anthology is a holistic, global survey of a lyric conversation about the divine, one which has been ongoing for millennia. Beginning with the earliest attributable author in all of human literature, the twenty-third century BCE Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna, and taking in a constellation of voices - from King David to Lao Tzu, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Malian Epic of Sundiata - this selection presents a number of canonical figures like Blake, Dickinson and Tagore, alongside lesser-anthologized, diverse poets going up to the present day. Together they show the breathtaking multiplicity of ways humanity has responded to the spiritual, across place and time.

The fourteen essays in this volume contribute significantly to a consideration of the interplay between nation and narration that currently dominates both literary and cultural studies. With the fervent reassertion of tribal domains throughout the world, and with the consequent threat to the stability of a common discourse in putative countries once mapped and subsequently dominated by colonizing powers, the need for such studies becomes increasingly obvious. Whose idea of a nation is to prevail throughout these postcolonial territories; whose claims to speak for a people are to be legitimized by international agreement; amid the demands of patriotic rhetoric, what role may be allowed for individual expression that attempts to transcend the immediate political agenda; who may assume positions of authority in defining an ethnic paradigm — such are the questions variously addressed in this volume. The essayists who here contribute to the discussion are students of the various national literatures that are now becoming more generally available in the West. The range of topics is broad — moving globally from the Caribbean and South America, through the African continent, and on to the Indian subcontinent, and moving temporally through the nineteenth century and into the closing days of our twentieth. We deal with poetry, fiction, and theoretical writings, and have two types of reader in mind: We hope to introduce the uninitiated to the breadth of this expanding field, and we hope to aid those with a specialized knowledge of one or other of these literatures in their consideration of the extent to which post-colonial writing may or may not form a reasonably unified field. We seek to avoid the new form of colonialism that might impose a theoretical template to these quite divergent writings, falsely rendering it all accessible and familiar. At the same time, we do note questions and concerns that cross borders, whether these imagined lines are spatial, temporal, gendered or racial.