Modern Irish and Scottish Poetry

Peter Mackay, Edna Longley, Fran Brearton

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780521196024
• eBook ISBN: 9781139065191
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The comparative study of the literatures of Ireland and Scotland has emerged as a distinct and buoyant field in recent years. This collection of new essays offers the first sustained comparison of modern Irish and Scottish poetry, featuring close readings of texts within broad historical and political contextualisation. Playing on influences, crossovers, connections, disconnections and differences, the 'affinities' and 'opposites' traced in this book cross both Irish and Scottish poetry in many directions. Contributors include major scholars of the new 'archipelagic' approach, as well as leading Irish and Scottish poets providing important insights into current creative practice. Poets discussed include W. B. Yeats, Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley MacLean, Louis MacNeice, Edwin Morgan, Douglas Dunn, Seamus Heaney, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Michael Longley, Medbh McGuckian, Nuala ni Dhomhnaill, Don Paterson and Kathleen Jamie. This book is a major contribution to our understanding of poetry from these islands in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Swordsmen: W. B. Yeats and Hugh MacDiarmid
• Chapter 2 Tradition and the individual editor: Professor Grierson, modernism and national poetics
• Chapter 3 Louis MacNeice among the islands
• Chapter 4 Townland, desert, cave: Irish and Scottish Second World War poetry
• Chapter 5 Affinities in time and space: reading the Gaelic poetry of Ireland and Scotland
• Chapter 6 Contemporary affinities
• Chapter 7 The Classics in modern Scottish and Irish poetry
• Chapter 8 Translating Beowulf: Edwin Morgan and Seamus Heaney
• Chapter 9 Reading in the gutters
• Chapter 10 ‘What matters is the yeast’: ‘foreignising’ Gaelic poetry
• Chapter 11 Outside English: Irish and Scottish poets in the East
• Chapter 12 Names for nameless things: the poetics of place names
• Chapter 13 Desire lines: mapping the city in contemporary Belfast and Glasgow poetry
• Chapter 14 ‘The ugly burds without wings’?: reactions to tradition since the 1960s
• Chapter 15 ‘And cannot say / and cannot say’: Richard Price, Randolph Healy and the dialogue of the deaf
• Chapter 16 On ‘The Friendship of Young Poets’: Douglas Dunn, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon
• Chapter 17 ‘No misprints in this work’: the poetic ‘translations’ of Medbh McGuckian and Frank Kuppner
• Chapter 18 Phoenix or dead crow? Irish and Scottish poetry magazines, 1945–2000
• Chapter 19 Outwith the Pale: Irish-Scottish studies as an act of translation
• Guide to further reading
• Index