Writer, poet, lecturer, broadcaster and man-of -letters, John Jordan (1930-88) was a distinguished scholar-critic in the Dublin of his day, teaching English at University College Dublin (1955-66) and at the Memorial University of Newfoundland at St John’s (1966-7). A true cosmopolitan, and formidably read, his interests ranged from drama to literature in all its forms. This gathering of prose essays and reviews are taken from the columns of the Irish Press, Hibernia, The Crane Bag and Irish University Review and Poetry Ireland (a magazine he refounded in 1962), as well as from private unpublished papers. They focus on the mid-century canon of Irish and Anglo-American writing: Joyce, Yeats, Lawrence, Eliot, Kavanagh, O’Casey, Behan, Clarke, Stuart, Bowen, Gregory, Synge, Shaw and Wilde, as well as on the new voices of a succeeding generation: Kinsella, Cronin, Hutchinson, Heaney, and Durcan. With occasional literary detours to Russia, France and Spain, Jordan brings a continental sensibility to bear on his literary milieu.
