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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.

This is the first book-length critical study of the contemporary British poet, Don Paterson. It includes eight essays by leading literary critics and writers. These explore the social, historical, and personal dimensions of Paterson's poetry and prose. The book relates Paterson's work to the classical, medieval, early modern, modernist, and contemporary voices that inform it. It analyses the literary qualities across Paterson's poetry and prose, from his sonnets to his long sequences, his aphorisms to his versions and translations. It considers Paterson as a figure actively negotiating his place within literary history and theory, as well as confronting that history with humour and directness. It also includes two interviews with Paterson, a critical introduction, and a bibliography. Overall, it attends to key issues in British poetry and publishing, including: translation, national and international identities, spirituality and religion, the contemporary poetry industry, poetry and mathematics, the intersections of poetry, art and music, and psychoanalysis and the body.

Forms of a World: Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization shows how the forms of contemporary poetry are forged through the transformations of globalization from 1970 to the present. The book’s inquiry springs from two related questions: what happens when we think of poetry as a global literary form, and when we think of the global in poetic terms? I argue that analyses of globalization are incomplete without poetry and that contemporary poetry cannot be understood fully without acknowledging the global forces from which it arises. Forms of a World contends that poetry’s role is not only to make visible thematically the violence of global dispossessions, but to renew performatively the missing conditions for intervening within these processes. Poetic acts—in this book, the rhetoric of possessing, belonging, exhorting, and prospecting—address contemporary conditions that render social life ever more precarious. I turn to an eclectic group of Anglophone poets, from Seamus Heaney and Claudia Rankine to Natasha Trethewey and Kofi Awoonor, whose poetry and whose lives are, in different but related ways, inseparable from the contemporary global situation. These poets creatively intervene in global processes by remaking their poetry’s repertoire of forms, from experiments in the sonnet to contemporary inventions of the ode.

Attention Equals Life examines why a quest to pay attention to daily life has increasingly become a central feature of both contemporary American poetry and the wider culture of which it is a part. Drawing on theories and debates about the nature of everyday life from fields in the humanities, this book traces the modern history of this preoccupation and considers why it is so much with us today. Attention Equals Life argues that it is no coincidence a potent hunger for everyday life exploded in the post-1945 period. This cultural need could be seen as a reaction to rapid and dislocating cultural, political, and social transformations that have resulted in a culture of perilous distraction, interruption, and fragmented attention. The book argues that poetry has mounted a response, and even resistance, to a culture that is gradually losing its capacity to pay attention. It examines why a compulsion to represent the everyday became predominant in decades after modernism, why it has often led to unusual projects and formal innovations, and why poetry in particular might be an everyday-life genre par excellence. The book considers the forms this preoccupation takes and examines their aesthetic, philosophical, and political ramifications. By exploring these innovative strategies, unusual projects, and new technologies as methods of attending to dailiness, Attention Equals Life uncovers an important factor at the heart of twentieth- and twenty-first–century literature.

What is poetry? Often it is understood as a largely self-enclosed verbal system— “suspended from any mutual interaction with alien discourse,” in the words of Mikhail Bakhtin. But this book reveals modern and contemporary poetry’s dialogue with other genres and discourses, especially the novel, theory, the law, news, prayer, and song. Poetry generates rich new possibilities, it argues, by absorbing and contending with its near verbal relatives. Exploring a heterogeneous array of English-language poets— from Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams to Frank O’Hara, Paul Muldoon, Rae Armantrout, Lorna Goodison, M. NourbeSe Philip, and many others— this book shows that poetry both blends with other genres and distinguishes itself from them: the realism of the novel and the news’s empiricism, the abstractions of theory and the law’s social ordering, the ritualism of prayer and the voice-engrained melodies of song. In close readings of famous and little-known poems, the book demonstrates an interpretive practice that combines dialogic analysis, in this case of poetry’s absorption of closely related discursive forms, with genre-specific analysis of poetry’s persisting awareness of its difference. Even as poetry stretches to incorporate various genres, it puts on display the compression, dense figuration, self-reflexivity, and sonic and visual form by which it differentiates itself from the others it metabolizes. In this book, the first to trace poetry’s interactions with its discursive cousins, we understand what poetry is by closely examining its interplay with what it is not.

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.

This book examines why it is important to appreciate cultural artefacts such as poems, sculptures, and buildings not as static, perfected objects, but as meshworks of entangled, mutable, and trans-personal forces. Offering six such case studies across the long twentieth century, the book focuses on how poetic works activate closer appreciation of literature’s hybridity. The book analyses how such texts are collaborative, emergent, and between-categories, and shows why this matters. It focuses, first, on how printed poetry is often produced collaboratively, in dialogue with the visual and plastic arts; and second, how it comes about through entangled and emergent agencies. Both have been overlooked in contemporary scholarship. Although this proposal makes some trouble for established disciplinary modes of reception and literary classification, for this reason, it also paves the way for new critical responses. Chiefly, Fugitive Pieces encourages the development of modes of literary critical engagement which acknowledge their uncertainty, vulnerability, and provisionality. Such reading involves encountering poems as co-constituted through materials that have frequently been treated as extra-literary, and in some cases extra-human. Focusing on works by Djuna Barnes, David Jones, F.T. Prince, Ted Hughes, Denise Riley, and Paul Muldoon, Fugitive Pieces fosters closer attention to how literary works operate beyond the boundaries of artistic categorization and agency. It examines the politics of disciplinary criticism, and the tensions between anthropocentric understandings of value and intra-agential collaborative practices. Its purpose is to stimulate much-needed analysis of printed works as combinatorial and hybrid, passing between published versions and artforms, persons and practices.