Poetics of the Local

Globalization, Place, and Contemporary Irish Poetry

Shirley Lau Wong

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781438493817, 9781438493824
• eBook ISBN: 9781438493831
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Considers how Irish poets have drawn on discourses of locality to articulate new forms of place and belonging amid Ireland's transforming global identity.

Winner of the 2023 Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature presented by the American Conference on Irish Studies

Poetics of the Local considers contemporary Irish poetry in light of transnational forces of globalization and financialization, showing how these conditions have shaped poetic innovation in Ireland from the 1960s to the present. The book is organized around different sites caught in the growing pains of a rapidly globalizing Ireland-from the "ghost estates," or housing projects abandoned after the economic boom of the 1990s, to the urban "regeneration" of Belfast after the Troubles, to the transformation of Dublin into a hub for creative economy programs like the UNESCO City of Literature. In readings of works by Thomas Kinsella, Paula Meehan, Seamus Heaney, John Montague, Ciaran Carson, Leontia Flynn, Alan Gillis, Sinéad Morrissey, and Paul Muldoon, Shirley Lau Wong argues that the enduring centrality of place in Irish poetry should be seen not as a hangover of nostalgic nationalism but rather as an exploration of the material and emplaced effects of the seemingly faraway processes of global capitalism.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Poetics of the Local
• Chapter 1. Occasional Poetry and the Creative Economy
• Chapter 2. Some Versions of Irish Pastoral
• Chapter 3. The Loco-descriptive Details of Belfast
• Chapter 4. Paul Muldoon and the Difficulty of Comparison
• Coda: Race, Place, and the Grounds of Irish Geopolitics
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover