CONTEMPORARY BRITISH AND IRISH POETRY, 1960 – 2015 Edited by Wolfgang Görtschacher and David Malcolm. Wiley Humanities, is out now.
A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015 | Wiley
978-1-118-84320-8
| Hardcover, 635 pages! | $195 £150 €135.60
I have a couple of essays in this massive compendium of British and Irish poetry, which has arrived today. It has taken some years for the two editors to put it together, and while I obviously haven’t read it (though I know Scott Thurston’s piece on ‘Linguistically Innovative Poetry’), just turning the pages over, I can tell this is a splendid book. Having written for both of the editors before, I vouch for their editorial thoroughness. Of course, it’s pricy, but it’s huge; ask your library to get it.
It is a comprehensive and scholarly review of contemporary British and Irish Poetry with contributions from noted scholars in the field. A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015 offers a collection of writings from a diverse group of experts. They explore the richness of the work of individual poets, genres, forms, techniques, traditions, concerns, and institutions that comprise these two distinct but interrelated national poetries. The best I can do at this early stage to ‘review’ it – it has literally arrived in the last hour – is to list its contents at the end of this post. I plan to read it all, in order. What I can say is that I’m pleased there is acknowledgment of the alternative poetries alongside the mainstream offerings. I know library copies of such books demonstrate the prevalent use, through wear and tear, of pages relating to canonical figures, but the rest is obdurately present. The limit of 2015 is judicious, I think, since these books take a long while to assemble. And quite a lot has happened since 2015 which cannot be its concern.
The editors are Wolfgang Görtschacher, PhD, Senior Assistant Professor at the University of Salzburg, where he has taught literary criticism and translation studies since the early 1990s. He has published widely on British poetry magazines, contemporary British and Irish literature, and translation studies. And David Malcolm, a professor of English at SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw. He previously taught for twenty-eight years at the University of Gdańsk and has published extensively on British and Irish fiction and poetry. Both have appeared at Edge Hill for conferences or papers. I write about the book in a flash review here: Pages: A Rapid Response to A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry ed. Gortschacher and Malcolm (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
In their introduction, the editors discuss a number of poems, and I’m pleased (and surprised) to announce that my own sequence ‘Fucking Time: Six Songs for the Earl of Rochester’ is discussed there. They signal that the poem appears in my Tin Pan Arcadia which is the only 21st century volume of mine out of print: it appears in the still-available Complete Twentieth Century Blues (see here: Complete Twentieth Century Blues, Robert Sheppard - Salt (saltpublishing.com) and re-appears in History or Sleep, my selected poems (see here: Shearsman Books buy Robert Sheppard - History or Sleep - Selected Poems
See here: Pages: Twentieth Century Blues published ten years ago! (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) Oh, and here, too, for the original Fucking Time booklet with images: Pages: Ship of Fools press exhibition: Fucking Time by Sheppard and Farrell (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). I particularly like the parenthetical observation: ‘it is lewd throughout’!
A part of the introduction aligns itself with formalist readings of poetry, and quotes Derek Attridge, as do I in my The Meaning of Form. See here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: The Meaning of Form in Contemporary Innovative Poetry PUBLISHED
I have two essays in A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015 . As you can see from the list of contents, first I write about ‘The British Poetry Revival’, a subject I have revisited on this blog as well:
Pages: Robert Sheppard: Return to the British Poetry Revival 1960-78
There’s also much about the Brsitish Poetry Revival in a later take than the piece in this book, part of a partial review of Juha Virtanen's excellent book on performance in poetry, Pages: Thoughts on Collaboration 13 or: review of Juha Virtanen, Poetry and Performance During the British Poetry Revival 1960-1980: Event and Effect. (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). (He also has a piece in the book, which I am looking forward to reading.) Here's Better Books:
Secondly, I present here what I thought of as my definitive piece on the work of Lee Harwood, when I wrote it.
My review
of Harwood’s Collected Poems 2004 appears in two parts here and here.
I review the reprint of HMS Little Fox here: Pages:
Robert Sheppard: HMS Little Fox by Lee Harwood republished (My reading of 'The
Long Black Veil')
Details of this new book, published by WileyHumanities www.wiley.com , may be found here:
A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015 | Wiley
Its contents are:
Section
1 Introduction – 1960-2015: A Brief Overview of the Verse
Wolfgang Görtschacher and David Malcolm
Section
2 Contexts, Forms, Topics, and Movements
a.
Institutions, Histories, Receptions
1. Some
Institutions of the British and Irish (Sub)Fields of Poetry: Little Magazines,
Publishers, Prizes, and Poetry in Translation
Wolfgang
Görtschacher
2.
Anthologies: Distortions and Corrections, Poetries, and Voices
David
Kennedy
3. Minding
the Trench: The Reception of British and Irish Poetry in America, 1960-2015
Daniel Bourne
4.
Readers: Who Reads Modern Poetry?
Juha
Virtanen
b.
Genre, Kind, Technique
1.
Manifestos and Poetics/Poets on Writing
Daniel
Weston
2. The
Genres of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry
Gareth
Farmer
3. The
Elegy
Stephen
Regan
4. The
Sonnet
David
Fuller
5. Free
Verse and Open Form
Lacy
Rumsey
6. Satire
David
Wheatley
7. The
Traditional Short Lyric Poem in Britain and Ireland, 1960-2010
Tim
Liardet and Jennifer Militello
8.
(Post)Modern Lyric Poetry
Alex
Perstell
9. The
Long Poem after Pound
Will May
c.
Groupings, Themes
1.
Generations
Robert
Hampson
2. The
Movement
David
Malcolm
3. The
Liverpool Poets
Ludmiła
Gruszewska Blaim
4. The
British Poetry Revival
Robert
Sheppard
5. Poets
of Ulster
Martin
Ryle
6.
Martians: Towards a Poetics of Wonder
Małgorzata
Grzegorzewska
7.
Linguistically Innovative Poetry in the 1980s and 1990s
Scott
Thurston
8.
Concrete and Performance Poetry
Jerzy
Jarniewicz
9.
Performances of Technology as Compositional Practice in British and Irish
Contemporary Poetry
John
Sparrow
10. “Here
to Stay”: Black British Poetry and the post–WWII United Kingdom
Bartosz
Wójcik
11.
Anglo-Jewish Poetry
David
Malcolm
12. Gay
and Lesbian Poetry
Prudence
Chamberlain
13. Women
Poets in the British Isles
Marc Porée
14. Irish
Women Poets
Monika
Szuba
15.
Religious Poetry, 1960-2015
Hugh
Dunkerley
16. Love
Poetry
Eleanor
Spencer
17.
Political Poetry
Ian
Davidson and Jo Lindsay Walton
18.
Radical Landscape Poetry in Scotland
Alan Riach
19.
Coincidentia Oppositorum: Myth in Contemporary Poetry
Erik
Martiny
d. The
Past and Other Countries
1. History
and Poetry
Jerzy
Jarniewicz
2. British
and Irish Poets Abroad/in Exile
Glyn
Pursglove
Section
3 Poets and Poems: Canon, Off-Canon, Non-Canon
3.1 John
Agard - Ralf Hertel
3.2 Eavan
Boland - Peter Hühn
3.3 Paul
Durcan - Jessika Köhler
3.4 James
Fenton - David Malcolm
3.5 Bill
Griffiths - Ian Davidson
3.6
Excluding Visions of Life in Poems by Thom Gunn - Tomasz Wisniewski
3. 7 “Now
Put It Together”: Lee Harwood and the Gentle Art of Collage - Robert Sheppard
3.8
Listening to Words and Silence: The Poetry of Elizabeth Jennings - Jean Ward
3.9
“Forever in excess”: Barry MacSweeney, Consumerism, and Popular Culture - Paul
Batchelor
3.10 When
Understanding Breaks in Waves: Voices and Messages in Edwin Morgan’s Poetry -
Monika Kocot
3.11 Grace
Nichols - Pilar Sánchez Calle
3.12 F. T.
Prince - Will May
3.13
Kathleen Raine - Glyn Pursglove
3.14
“Everything except justice is an impertinence”: The Poetry of Peter Riley -
Peter Hughes
3.15 Anne
Stevenson - Eleanor Spencer
3.16 Paula Meehan – Vocal Cartographies: Public and Private
