Books in the Modern Poetry series

Voices and Visions captures the perspectives of key Anglophone Welsh and Wales-associated poets who have emerged in the wake of devolution or whose career profiles and development were consolidated in its wake. It is a fascinating record of play, seriousness, ambition, and local and international interests.

These essays provide new perspectives on John Berryman's work by critics from Ireland, the UK, Canada and the USA. Encompassing a wide range of scholarly perspectives and introducing several emerging voices in the field of Berryman studies, the volume points to new directions for critical study and creative engagement with the poet's work.

The similarities and differences between poetry and worship have intrigued writers since at least the nineteenth century, when John Keble declared that poetic symbols could almost partake of the nature of sacraments. Since then poets, philosophers and literary critics alike have evoked the terms 'sacrament' and 'incarnation' to make claims about art and poetry. Extending and challenging this critical tradition, this book explores the influence of sacramental belief on the works of three Roman Catholic poets: the nineteenth-century Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Anglo-Welsh artist David Jones and the Australian poet Les Murray. The author explores the idea that the incarnation and the sacraments embody both God's immanence and God's transcendence and argues that Hopkins, Jones and Murray all endeavour to enclose the 'open mystery' of the Divine while recognizing that it cannot be imprisoned. The volume sets their writings in conversation with each other's, as well as with literary, philosophical and theological discourse. The result is a study that shows the wonders, the mysteries and the difficulties of the sacramental worldview and its central place in the writings of these three major Catholic poets.

This volume is a critical introduction to the poetry of Irish writer Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. Writing poetry exclusively in Irish but allowing and overseeing translations of her work into several languages, primarily English, Ni Dhomhnaill is the first Irish-language poet to gain an international following. She is also a pioneer in fostering a renewed relationship between the two languages of Ireland's literary traditions. Ni Dhomhnaill is unflinching in her interventions into problematic social, linguistic and even theoretical arenas, and is well known for her brutal parodies, ribald sexual scenarios and persistent debunking and revising of religious, political and mythological imagery. Her primary thematic concerns demonstrate her dedication to critiquing and ultimately changing dominant discourses so that they account for the presence and contributions of women writers. This volume explores the fraught issues of translating and contextualizing Ni Dhomhnaill's A uvre, her use and revisions of Irish myth, folklore and political and religious iconography, her re-imagining of the mother in culture and religious ideology, and the devices of death, silence and psychoanalytic discourse in her mermaid cycle and other poems. The book hails Ni Dhomhnaill, who has not hitherto received a great deal of critical attention in English, as a major figure in world literature.

Geoffrey Hill and his Contexts

James Tate is one of America's most respected and senior poets, whose influence is increasingly widespread. However, his whimsical play has long challenged critics to read him with any depth. After winning the Yale Prize in 1967 for his first book, The Lost Pilot, published when he was just twenty-three, Tate has since gone on to win major literary awards including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Tanning Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Academy of American Poets. This is the first monograph dedicated to Tate's A uvre. The author provides a practical reading theory for Tate, complete with contextual frameworks. Close readings of Tate's work are informed by the purposeful purposelessness of Kant, the surrealist debt to Breton, and the problems and pleasures of language as explored by Derrida. Tate's great achievement is no less than a reconfiguring of the modern American lyric as a poetry of dramatic and dialogic narrative. Composed out of 'odds and ends ... of no great moment', as the poet himself writes, Tate's work extends the varied American traditions of writers such as William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, John Berryman, and John Ashbery.

This volume brings together sixteen essays on British, Irish and American poets from the late nineteenth century to the present day. It offers a series of entertaining and compelling readings of the lives and works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, W.B. Yeats, Edward Thomas, T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, James Schuyler, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Ted Hughes and Paul Muldoon among others. Arranged chronologically, the essays present a wide-ranging and sophisticated narrative that takes the reader from the first stirrings of modernism through to the dynamic experiments of the present day. A number of essays attend to particular artistic alignments. One explores the relationship between Wallace Stevens and the unjustly neglected English poet Nicholas Moore, another the close friendship between James Schuyler and the painter Fairfield Porter, while a third contends that the lyrics, music and career of Bob Dylan unwittingly illustrate many of the key tenets of the great nineteenth-century essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson.

This book considers the development of the lyric form in recent American poetry of the past three decades. By concentrating on the writing of three poets associated with language writing, Charles Bernstein, Michael Palmer and Lyn Hejinian, the discussion considers the attempts of contemporary poetry to problematise the identification of the lyric as a static model of subjectivity. Central considerations motivating the discussion are: How do contemporary lyric poets negotiate the propositions posed by postmodern thought? What reading of lyricism can one formulate once the self is displaced from centre stage and an ¿experience¿ of language takes its place? The book proposes that an aesthetic of error enables us to approach the reconfiguration of the lyric in recent innovative poetry. Drawing from elements of modernist poetic practice, psychoanalytic theory, language philosophy and critical theory this book pursues methods for understanding the demands placed upon the reader of contemporary poetry.

In discussions of American poetry since World War II, the work of John Berryman has become increasingly neglected and marginalized. Critics have overwhelmingly chosen to favour the notion that he is an academic, ¿establishment¿ poet whose career can comfortably be described as a move from New Critical traditionalism towards self-absorbed confessionalism. This study shows how such a narrow understanding of Berryman¿s work is reflective of a broader critical inclination towards a codification of the literary canon as a duel between competing factions of a formalist, establishment ¿mainstream¿ and an experimentalist, countercultural ¿avant-garde¿. By examining the extent to which Berryman¿s poetry engages with the complex religiopolitical climate of Cold War American culture, this study exposes the inadequacy of the paradigm of mainstream traditionalism in relation to his work. In doing so, it opens up threads of comparative possibility between his work and that of poets ordinarily segregated from him by divisive conceptions of the literary canon. As such, this volume provides a reconsideration of Berryman¿s work that simultaneously asks broader questions about the nature of the American poetic canon and established definitions of ¿postmodern¿ poetry.

This book is a timely investigation of a poet whose work seems simultaneously to invite analysis and to refuse explanations of its sensuous, allusive language. Alongside close readings of the poems, it reveals findings from the Geoffrey Hill Archive and explores Hill's critical writings.

Addressing a range of poets who are associated with Wales by either birth or residence and have been significantly active in the post-1997 period, it seeks to understand the various ways in which Wales's Anglophone poetic life has been intertwined both with devolutionary matters specifically and the life of contemporary Wales more generally.