Negotiations: Poems in Their Contexts

This book, by the eminent poetry critic Neil Corcoran, examines the ways in which the work of significant modern Irish, British and American poets interacts with or ’negotiates’ different contexts - historical, social, political, artistic and aesthetic. In Part 1 important work by David Jones, Robert Graves, Seamus Heaney and Bob Dylan is shown to negotiate poetic methods - both traditional and modernist - and also the work of major earlier writers to produce strikingly original new forms; and Derek Mahon’s prose is read in the light of these concerns. The books shows how, by negotiating in this way, their work engages profoundly with complex and sometimes terrible histories, including the First World War and the Northern Irish Troubles. Part 2 discusses the ways in which ’ekphrastic’ work - poems which engage with visual art - by Elizabeth Bishop, W. S. Graham, John Ashbery, Sylvia Plath and Ciaran Carson negotiates comparable poetic and historical inheritances while also inventively responding to work by significant artists, notably Parmigianino, Poussin, de Chirico, Klee and members of the St Ives School. The book is a signal contribution to current critical debates about these poets, situating them in original or newly clarified contexts, and it offers exemplary close readings of noteworthy poems.

Neil Corcoran is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool.