Crisis and Contemporary Poetry

What are the means available to poetry to address crisis and how can both poets and critics meet the conflicts and challenges they face? This collection of essays addresses poetic and critical responses to the various crises encountered by contemporary writers and our society, from the Holocaust to the ecological crisis.

ANNE KARHIO is Lady Gregory Fellow of the College of Arts, Social Sciences, and Celtic Studies at the National University of Ireland, Galway, Republic of Ireland. Her research focuses on poetic discourse and place in the work of Paul Muldoon, and she has published a number of critical essays on contemporary Irish poetry.

SEÁN CROSSON has published widely on Irish poetry and literature including his book ‘The Given Note’ Traditional Music and Modern Irish Poetry (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008) and as co-editor of the collection Anáil an Bhéil Bheo: Orality and Modern Irish Culture (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009). He is currently Programme Director of the MA in Film Studies at the Huston School of Film & Digital Media at National University of Ireland, Galway, Republic of Ireland.

CHARLES I. ARMSTRONG is a Professor of British Literature at the University of Bergen, Norway. He has previously published Figures of Memory: Poetry, Space and the Past (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and Romantic Organicism: From Idealist Origins to Ambivalent Afterlife (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

Acknowledgements
Introduction
PART I: THE LIMITS OF EXPRESSION: REPRESENTATION AND IDENTITY
Form, Historical Crisis and Poetry’s Hope in George Szirtes’ ‘Metro’; J.Sears
Persona, Trauma, and Survival in Louise Glück’s Postmodern, Mythic, Twenty-first Century ’October’; M.K.Azcuy
Hern: The Catastrophe of Lyric in John Burnside; S.Brewster
PART II: A SPECIAL CASE: CRISIS AND POETRY IN NORTHERN IRELAND
‘In a ghostly pool of blood / a crumpled phantom hugged the mud’: Spectropoetic Presentations of Bloody Sunday and the Crisis of Northern Ireland; R.Moi
‘The Given Note’ - Traditional Music, Crisis and the Poetry of Seamus Heaney; S.Crosson
‘Crisis first-hand’: Seamus Heaney Before and After the Ceasefire; S.Regan
The Mundane and the Monstrous: Everyday Epiphanies in Northern Irish Poetry; C.I.Armstrong
PART III: SITUATED WORDS: PLACE, ECOLOGY AND LANDSCAPE
‘The Memorial to all of them’: Landscape and the Holocaust in the Poetry of Michael Longley; B.Corcoran
‘Toward a Brink’: The Poetry of Kathleen Jamie and Environmental Crisis; L.Collins
Sounding the Landscape: Dis-placement in the Poetry of Alice Oswald; J.S.Drangsholt
Place, Narrative and Crisis in the Long Poems of Paul Muldoon; A.Karhio
PART IV: SUSPENDED JUDGEMENTS: RETHINKING POETIC RECEPTION
Paul Muldoon: Critical Judgment, the Crisis Poem, and the Ethics of Voice; G.Batten
Displacing the Crisis: New British Poetry, Cultural Memory and the Rôle of the Intellectual; E.Mueller-Zettelmann
The Body of Text Meets the Body as Text: Staging (I)dentity in the Work of SuAndi and Lemn Sissay; D.Osborne
Selected Bibliography
Index