A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов
history permeates many of the poems discussed. This is, above all, the matter of England and of Ireland, but our hypothesis is that a concern with history (both broadly and restrictively conceived) runs through much British and Irish poetry of the last 60 years. Such a concern is apparent in Larkin's, Harwood's, Heaney's, Harrison's, Hill's, Montague's, Johnson's, Warner's, Kay's, and Marriott's verses, in which grand events are interwoven with local and personal histories. If we interpret the term history even more broadly, other texts (for example, all the texts by women writers) could be included in this grouping.
So let this be our story about British and Irish poetry since 1960: technically complex in its working of order and disorder; engaged, often in a disruptive and ironic fashion, with literary and social traditions; offering demotic and marginalized voices and focuses; permeated by motifs of impotence; and fascinated with history.
But these are generalities. The engagement with the individual text and collection, and their attentive reading (on several levels), is the thing.
References
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12 Harrison, Tony (1984). Selected Poems. Harmondsworth, London: Penguin.
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26 Marriott, D. S. (2008). Hoodoo Voodoo. Exeter: Shearsman.
27 Montague, John (1989). The Rough Field. Oldcastle, County Meath: The Gallery Press.
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Notes
1 1 A version of the opening section of this introduction appeared in Wolfgang Görtschacher and David Malcolm, eds., Sound Is/As Sense: Essays on Modern British and Irish Poetry, vol. 6 (Gdańsk: University of Gdańsk Press, 2016), 9–13.
2 2 We are aware that such a statement sounds paradoxical. Of course, all poems (all texts) mean what they say and say what they mean, in as much as the interaction of subject and technique is the meaning. However, some poems seem to complicate their ultimate meanings much more than others, and the interplay of a manifest meaning and a latent one is what the poem says and does. Other poems do this to a markedly lesser extent.
2a.1 Some Institutions of the British and Irish (Sub)Fields of Poetry: Little Magazines, Publishers, Prizes, and Poetry in Translation
Wolfgang Görtschacher
Introduction
Any analysis of the institutions at work in the field of British and Irish poetry (original and translated), which allows itself to be seduced by the attractions of comprehensiveness and representative quality, must be doomed to failure. The extent and degree of detail called for would involve the writer in a project of encyclopedic dimensions, such as could provide occupation for an army of academics and experts for whole years to come. Consequently, the account offered here of the fields and subfields of British and Irish poetry, while it certainly does not ignore what is characteristic and tries to be as complete as possible, does not make the mistake of sanctifying as “representative” any and every feature that can be identified, discussed, and documented; working within limits, it tries to achieve a consistent and coherent picture; it looks at various institutions like the “little magazines,” poetry publishing in general, the system of awards and prizes meant to encourage poetry, and tries to describe the character of their operation and effects on British and Irish poetry, including, as an integral aspect, the translated poetry published in Britain and Ireland. My selection of institutions (and the picture I have produced) must be to a degree subjective, but I have worked on the basis of criteria