A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015

Eleanor Spencerteaches in the Department of English Studies at Durham University, where she is also Vice Principal and senior tutor at St. Chad's College. She was previously a Frank Knox Memorial fellow at Harvard University, and is the editor of the New Casebooks on American Poetry since 1945 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

Monika Szubais lecturer in English literature at the University of Gdańsk, Poland. Her research, which mainly focuses on twentieth and twenty‐first century poetry, is informed by environmental humanities and phenomenological perspectives. She is the editor of Boundless Scotland: Space in Scottish Fiction (University of Gdańsk Press, 2015) and coeditor, with Julian Wolfreys, of The Poetics of Space and Place in Scottish Literature (Palgrave, 2019). She is the author of Contemporary Scottish Poetry and the Natural World: Burnside, Jamie, Robertson and White (Edinburgh UP, 2020).

Scott Thurstonis reader in English and creative writing at the University of Salford. A poet and critic, he has written several volumes of poetry and published widely on innovative writing. He edited The Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk (2007) and compiled a book of interviews with innovative poets called Talking Poetics (Shearsman Books, 2011). Thurston also coedits the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry and co‐organizes The Other Room poetry reading series in Manchester.

Juha Virtanenis lecturer in contemporary literature at the University of Kent. His monograph, Poetry and Performance During the British Poetry Revival 1960–1980: Event and Effect , was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017. His own poetry publications include Back Channel Apraxia (Contraband, 2014) and – LAND (Oystercatcher Press, 2016). He coedits DATABLEED together with Eleanor Perry.

Jean Wardis an associate professor at the Institute of English and American Studies of Gdańsk University, Poland. She specializes in religious poetry, is the author of Christian Poetry in the Post‐Christian Day: Geoffrey Hill, R. S. Thomas, Elizabeth Jennings (Peter Lang, 2009), has contributed to collections of critical essays both in English and in Polish, on Jennings's poetics and her relationship with other poets, including George Herbert, G. M. Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, and David Jones.

Daniel Westonis senior lecturer of English literature at the University of Greenwich. His monograph, Contemporary Literary Landscapes: The Poetics of Experience , was published by Ashgate in 2017. He has published work on modern and contemporary poetry, prose fiction, and non‐fiction, with particular emphasis on literary geographies and place writing.

David Wheatleyis a reader in English and creative writing at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of six collections of poetry, including The President of Planet Earth (Carcanet, 2017), and the author of the critical study Contemporary British Poetry (Palgrave, 2014). He has also edited the poetry of James Clarence Mangan (2003) and of Samuel Beckett (2009), for Gallery Press and Faber and Faber, respectively.

Tomasz Wiśniewskiwas for several years the Deputy Director for Research in the Institute of English and American Studies at the University of Gdańsk. He is a cofounder of the Between.Pomiędzy Festival, and the founder of the Beckett Research Group in Gdan&c.acute;sk. He has published Complicite, Theatre and Aesthetics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and a monograph on Samuel Beckett (Universitas, 2006). He is a member of the editorial board of the global portal The Theatre Times and the literary quarterly Tekstualia .

Bartosz Wójcikis a translator, literary critic, and cultural manager. He has published scholarly papers on the works of, among others, Patience Agbabi, Jean Binta Breeze, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Kei Miller, Mutabaruka, Michael Smith, and Derek Walcott. He is the author of Afro‐Caribbean Poetry in English: Cultural Traditions (Peter Lang, 2015) and works at the Centre for the Meeting of Cultures in Lublin, Poland ( spotkaniakultur.com).

With such a long, multi‐authored book on such a complex and provocative subject, editors of necessity feel that the reader deserves a few words of explanation before he/she starts to read it.

In our choice of topics and poets, we have been guided by what we felt to be important and useful. We are well aware that another two editors would have approached the field quite differently. We have aimed to open up contemporary British and Irish poetry to a variety of readers in order to give them some sense of the richness of individual poets, genres, forms, techniques, traditions, concerns, and institutions that make up these two distinct but interrelated poetries.

We have encouraged the authors of the essays in this volume to shape their contributions as they thought best. As readers of poetry, we have a fondness, inter alia , for technical analysis of rhythm, meter, and sound. Not all the authors share this interest to the same degree, although all their analyses and interpretations are well‐grounded in the textual material of the poetry they discuss. Such diversity is as it should be. Further, we have allowed authors a latitude in the length of their essays. Some contributions are more concise than others. However, we insisted that the extent of the longer essays be justified in terms of the complexity and interest of the subjects that they address. Further, several essays are provocative and do not bow to established pieties. Again, surely, this is as it should be.

The volume has been several years in preparation. As a result, while we have tried to make sure it is as up‐to‐date as possible, some poets in the meantime may have published additional poems, and commentators published new studies. But this is an inevitable part of discourse in modern and contemporary literary studies.

Readers will be struck by the absence of separate essays on some well‐known and outstanding poets. Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Tony Harrison, and Geoffrey Hill are obvious examples, as is Carol Ann Duffy. We felt that the world did not need another separate essay on Larkin or Heaney, for instance. But a glance at the list of contents and the index to this volume will show that such celebrated poets (eximious within an extravagance of writers) appear continually throughout the volume in discussions of wider issues. In the essays on individual writers, we have chosen poets who deserve greater individual prominence than they have achieved hitherto, or writers who are emerging as major poetic voices.

From a personal perspective, we note with sadness the death of one of our contributors, the gifted poet and critic David Kennedy. In addition, we thank D. M. de Silva for his advice. We also thank the editorial team at Wiley‐Blackwell for their patience and support.

Wolfgang Görtschacher

David Malcolm

Wolfgang Görtschacher and David Malcolm

The story is a well‐known one, and this volume presents it in individual essays. The Movement. Alvarez's The New Poetry . The Liverpool poets. The Northern Irish. The British Poetry Revival. The Martians. Linguistically innovative poetry. Black British poetry. Women's poetry. Gay and lesbian voices. The abiding forces of regional poetry. American models. The stars: Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison, Paul Muldoon, and Carol Ann Duffy.