The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (Oxford Handbooks)

This Handbook offers an authoritative and up-to-date collection of original essays bringing together ground breaking research into the development of contemporary poetry in Britain and Ireland. Cover Contents List of Contributors Introduction: The Limits and Openness of the Contemporary PART I: MOVEMENTS OVER TIME 1. Modernist Survivors 2. The Thirties Bequest 3. The Unburied Past: Walking with Ghosts of the 1940s 4. ‘Obscure and Doubtful’: Stevie Smith, F. T. Prince, and Legacy 5. The Movement: Never and Always 6. ‘In different voices’: Modernism since the 1960s 7. Two Poetries?: A Re-examination of the ‘Poetry Divide’ in 1970s Britain 8. A Dog’s Chance: The Evolution of Contemporary Women’s Poetry? 9. CAT-scanning the Little Magazine 10. Books and the Market: Trade Publishers, State Subsidies, and Small Presses PART II: SENSES OF FORM AND TECHNIQUE 11. ‘Space available’: A Poet’s Decisions 12. Contemporary Poetry and Close Reading 13. ‘All livin language is sacred’: Poetry and Varieties of English in these Islands 14. Misremembered Lyric and Orphaned Music 15. ‘The degree of power exercised’: Recent Ekphrasis 16. Cinema Mon Amour: How British Poetry Fell in Love with Film 17. Singing Schools and Beyond: The Roles of Creative Writing PART III: POETRY IN PLACES 18. Historical and Archaeological: The Poetry of Recovery and Memory 19. London, Albion 20. The ‘London Cut’: Poetry and Science 21. ‘Dafter than we care to own’: Some Poets of the North of England 22. Auden in Ireland 23. ‘Other Modes of Being’: Nuala ní Dhomhnaill, Paul Muldoon, and Translation 24. Writing [W]here: Gender and Cultural Positioning in Ireland and Wales 25. The Altered Sublime: Raworth, Crozier, Prynne PART IV: BORDER CROSSINGS 26. Dislocating Country: Post-War English Poetry and the Politics of Movement 27. Multi-ethnic British Poetries 28. European Affinities 29. Scottish Poetry in the Wider World 30. The View from the USA 31. Audience and Awkwardness: Personal Poetry in Britain and New Zealand PART V: RESPONSIBILITIES AND VALUES 32. Speech Acts, Responsibility, and Commitment in Poetry 33. ‘Is a chat with me your fancy?: Address in Contemporary British Poetry 34. ‘There Again’: Composition, Revision, and Repair 35. Reparation, Atonement, and Redress 36. Contemporary Poetry and Belief 37. The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Poet 38. Contemporary Poetry and Value Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W Y Z The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry offers thirty-eight chapters of ground breaking research that form a collaborative guide to the many groupings and movements, the locations and styles, as well as concerns (aesthetic, political, cultural and ethical) that have helped shape contemporary poetry in Britain and Ireland. The book's introduction offers an anthropological participant-observer approach to its variously conflicted subjects, while exploring the limits and openness of the contemporary as a shifting and never wholly knowable category. The five ensuing sections explore: a history of the period's poetic movements; its engagement with form, technique, and the other arts; its association with particular locations and places; its connection with, and difference from, poetry in other parts of the world; and its circling around such ethical issues as whether poetry can perform actions in the world, can atone, redress, or repair, and how its significance is inseparable from acts of evaluation in both poets and readers. Though the book is not structured to feature chapters on authors thought to be canonical, on the principle that contemporary writers are by definition not yet canonical, the volume contains commentary on many prominent poets, as well as finding space for its contributors'enthusiasms for numerous less familiar figures. It has been organized to be read from cover to cover as an ever deepening exploration of a complex field, to be read in one or more of its five thematically structured sections, or indeed to be read by picking out single chapters or discussions of poets that particularly interest its individual readers. The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry offers thirty-eight chapters of ground breaking research that form a collaborative guide to the many groupings and movements, the locations and styles, as well as concerns (aesthetic, political, cultural and ethical) that have helped shape contemporary poetry in Britain and Ireland. The book's introduction offers an anthropological participant-observer approach to its variously conflicted subjects, while exploring the limits and openness of the contemporary as a shifting and never wholly knowable category. The five ensuing sections a history of the period's poetic movements; its engagement with form, technique, and the other arts; its association with particular locations and places; its connection with, and difference from, poetry in other parts of the world; and its circling around such ethical issues as whether poetry can perform actions in the world, can atone, redress, or repair, and how its significance is inseparable from acts of evaluation in both poets and readers. Though the book is not structured to feature chapters on authors thought to be canonical, on the principle that contemporary writers are by definition not yet canonical, the volume contains commentary on many prominent poets, as well as finding space for its contributors' enthusiasms for numerous less familiar figures. It has been organized to be read from cover to cover as an ever deepening exploration of a complex field, to be read in one or more of its five thematically structured sections, or indeed to be read by picking out single chapters or discussions of poets that particularly interest its individual readers. This book offers thirty-eight chapters of ground breaking research that form a collaborative guide to the many groupings and movements, the locations and styles, as well as concerns (aesthetic, political, cultural and ethical) that have helped shape contemporary poetry in Britain and Ireland. The book's introduction offers an anthropological participant-observer approach to its variously conflicted subjects, while exploring the limits and openness of the contemporary as a shifting and never wholly knowable category. The five ensuing sections explore: a history of the period's poetic movements; its engagement with form, technique, and the other arts; its association with particular locations and places; its connection with, and difference from, poetry in other parts of the world; and its circling around such ethical issues as whether poetry can perform actions in the world, can atone, redress, or repair, and how its significance is inseparable from acts of evaluation in both poets and readers.