Description
Book Synopsis
Poetry, Geography, Gender explores how questions of place, identity, and creative practice intersect in the work of some of Wales’s best-known contemporary poets, including Gillian Clarke, Gwyneth Lewis, Ruth Bidgood, and Sheenagh Pugh. Alice Entwistle illustrates how each writer’s relationship with her complex cultural hinterland—its languages, history, and imaginative and political geography—is staged and tested in the kinds of poems that each poet writes, as well as what she writes about. In doing so, Entwistle proposes a new way of reading both poetry and place, arguing that the Wales represented, in and through their choices of form and language, is precisely the kind of dynamic, outward-looking, and culturally confident nation that theorists of devolution and the fin de siècle might have envisioned.
Table of Contents1. On the Border(s): The interstitial poetries of the contact zone 2. 'Not without strangeness': Ruth Bidgood's unhomely mid-Wales 3. Frontier Country: Christine Evans 4. 'A kind of authentic lie': Gwyneth Lewis and the lyric sequence 5. Traverses, Ireland/Wales: Gillian Clarke, Christine Evans and Catherine Fisher 6. Wales and/or thereabouts: Sheenagh Pugh, Wendy Mulford and Zoe Skoulding
