Modern Irish and Scottish Poetry

The comparative study of the literatures of Ireland and Scotland has emerged as a distinct and buoyant field in recent years. This collection of new essays offers the first sustained comparison of modern Irish and Scottish poetry, featuring close readings of texts within broad historical and political contextualisation. Playing on influences, crossovers, connections, disconnections and differences, the 'affinities' and 'opposites' traced in this book cross both Irish and Scottish poetry in many directions. Contributors include major scholars of the new 'archipelagic' approach, as well as leading Irish and Scottish poets providing important insights into current creative practice. Poets discussed include W. B. Yeats, Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley MacLean, Louis MacNeice, Edwin Morgan, Douglas Dunn, Seamus Heaney, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Michael Longley, Medbh McGuckian, Nuala ni Dhomhnaill, Don Paterson and Kathleen Jamie. This book is a major contribution to our understanding of poetry from these islands in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Introduction Edna Longley; 1. Swordsmen: W. B. Yeats and Hugh MacDiarmid Patrick Crotty; 2. Tradition and the individual editor: Professor Grierson, modernism and national poetics Cairns Craig; 3. Louis MacNeice among the islands John Kerrigan; 4. Townland, desert, cave: Irish and Scottish Second World War poetry Peter Mackay; 5. Affinities in time and space: reading the Gaelic poetry of Ireland and Scotland Máire Ní Annracháin; 6. Contemporary affinities Douglas Dunn; 7. The classics in modern Scottish and Irish poetry Robert Crawford; 8. Translating Beowulf: Edwin Morgan and Seamus Heaney Hugh Magennis; 9. Reading in the gutters Eric Falci; 10. 'What matters is the yeast': 'foreignising' Gaelic poetry Christopher Whyte; 11. Outside English: Irish and Scottish poets in the East Justin Quinn; 12. Names for nameless things: the poetics of place names Alan Gillis; 13. Desire lines: mapping the city in contemporary Belfast and Glasgow poetry Aaron Kelly; 14. 'The ugly burds without wings'?: Reactions to tradition since the 1960s Eleanor Bell; 15. 'And cannot say/and cannot say': Richard Price, Randolph Healy and the Dialogue of the Deaf David Wheatley; 16. On 'The Friendship of Young Poets': Douglas Dunn, Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon Fran Brearton; 17. 'No misprints in this work': the poetic 'translations' of Medbh McGuckian and Frank Kuppner Leontia Flynn; 18. Phoenix or dead crow? Irish and Scottish poetry magazines 1945–2000 Edna Longley; 19. Out with the pale: Irish-Scottish studies as an act of translation Michael Brown; Further reading; Index.

Dr Peter Mackay has worked as a Research Fellow at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry and lectured on Scottish and Scottish Gaelic literature at Trinity College Dublin. He has written An Introduction to Sorley MacLean (2010) and is editing volumes of Gaelic poetry and critical essays.
Edna Longley MRIA, FBA is a Professor Emerita at Queen's University, Belfast. Her publications include Poetry and Posterity (2000) and as editor, Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems (2008).
Dr Fran Brearton is Reader in English at Queen's University, Belfast. She is the author of The Great War in Irish Poetry (2000) and Reading Michael Longley (2006).