Fran Brearton & Alan Gillis 
Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry 

Forty chapters, written by leading scholars across the world, describe the latest thinking on modern Irish poetry. The Handbook begins with a consideration of Yeats’s early work, and the legacy of the 19th century. The broadly chronological areas which follow, covering the period from the 1910s through to the 21st century, allow scope for coverage of key poetic voices in Ireland in their historical and political context. From the experimentalism of Beckett, Mac Greevy, and others of the modernist generation, to the refashioning of Yeats’s Ireland on the part of poets such as Mac Neice, Kavanagh, and Clarke mid-century, through to the controversially titled post-1969 ’Northern Renaissance’ of poetry, this volume will provide extensive coverage of the keymovements of the modern period. The Handbook covers the work of, among others, Paul Durcan, Thomas Kinsella, Brendan Kennelly, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Michael Longley, Medbh Mc Guckian, and Ciaran Carson. The thematic sections interspersed throughout – chapters on women’s poetry, religion, translation, painting, music, stylistics – allow for comparative studies of poets north and south across the century. Central to the guiding spirit of this project is the Handbook’s consideration of poetic forms, and a number of essaysexplore the generic diversity of poetry in Ireland, its various manipulations, reinventions and sometimes repudiations of traditional forms. The last essays in the book examine the work of a ’new’ generation of poets from Ireland, concentrating on work published in the last two decades by Justin Quinn, Leontia Flynn, Sinead Morrissey, David Wheatley, Vona Groarke, and others.