Description
Book SynopsisThis book, by the eminent poetry critic Neil Corcoran, examines the ways in which the work of significant modern Irish, British and American poets interacts with or ‘negotiates’ different contexts – historical, social, political, artistic and aesthetic. In Part 1 important work by David Jones, Robert Graves, Seamus Heaney and Bob Dylan is shown to negotiate poetic methods – both traditional and modernist – and also the work of major earlier writers to produce strikingly original new forms; and Derek Mahon’s prose is read in the light of these concerns. The books shows how, by negotiating in this way, their work engages profoundly with complex and sometimes terrible histories, including the First World War and the Northern Irish Troubles. Part 2 discusses the ways in which ‘ekphrastic’ work – poems which engage with visual art – by Elizabeth Bishop, W. S. Graham, John Ashbery, Sylvia Plath and Ciaran Carson negotiates comparable poetic and historical inheritances while also inventively responding to work by significant artists, notably Parmigianino, Poussin, de Chirico, Klee and members of the St Ives School. The book is a signal contribution to current critical debates about these poets, situating them in original or newly clarified contexts, and it offers exemplary close readings of noteworthy poems.
Trade Review'Corcoran has long been one of our finest critics of modern and contemporary poetry. His blend of elegance and insight is consistently wonderful. This book contains essential reading on David Jones, Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, W. S. Graham, and many others. The way he enriches the poetry that he discusses is galvanising, and these essays are a hugely welcome shot in the arm.'
- Alan Gillis, Professor of Modern Poetry, University of Edinburgh
Table of ContentsPreface
Part I. Negotiating Poems
1. Spilled Bitterness: David Jones’s
In Parenthesis between Myth and History 2. Robert Graves and Modern Poetry3. Irelands and Englands of the Mind: Seamus Heaney reading Shakespeare and Modern English Poetry4. Seamus Heaney and the Classics: Antaeus and Anchises 5. The Mahon Prose6. Beacon and Black Hole: Bob Dylan, Suze Rotolo and Two Songs of Parting
Part II. Poems Negotiating Paintings
7. Our Infant Sight: An Elizabeth Bishop Collage8. W.S. Graham, Looking9. Doubting Ashbery 10. The Enigma of Arrival: Sylvia Plath reading de Chirico, Yeats and Klee11. Against Time: On Ciaran Carson’s
Still Life
