Archipelago

Alice Oswald is a poet from Reading, recipient of the Eric Gregory Award, the Forward Poetry Prize, and the T.S. Eliot Prize for The Dart. Kathleen Jamie is a Scottish writer, whose writing has appeared internationally. She has taught poetry at the University of Stirling since 2010. Robert Macfarlane is a Writing Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. His work has won him the EM Forster Award for Literature. Sinéad Morrisey is a Northern Irish winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize. The Trinity College graduate has taught in Belfast and Newcastle. Andrew McNeillie is a Welsh poet, and current Literature Editor at Oxford University Press. His memoir An Aran Keening is published by The Lilliput Press, and he is founder of the Clutag Press. Seamus Heaney was born in Northern Ireland in 1939, and died in Dublin aged 74. His career included teaching at Harvard and Oxford, and receiving the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the EM Firster Award, the PEN Translation prise, the Golden Wreath of Poetry. The T.S. Eliot Prize, two Whitbread Prizes, and the Griffin Poetry Prize. Richard Murphy was an Anglo-Irish poet, and passed away in 2018. Recipient of many prestigious awards, including the AE Memorial Award and the American Irish Foundation Literary Award, he was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was included in the Oxford Companion to English Literature. Michael Longley is a Northern Irish poet, and winner of the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, and the PEN Pinter Prize in 2017. Derek Mahon is a Northern Irish poet. He studied at Trinity College and at the Sorbonne in Paris. He has won the David Cohen Prize for Literature and the Poetry Now Award. Deirdre Ní Chonghaile is a graduate of the University of Oxford and University College Cork. She is associated with NUI, Galway, and the University of Notre Dame, and is known for her work in music studies.

This book is thrilling: it leaves the reader scrambling for ground: Is every possible interpretation or nuance about archipelagoes contained here? The possibility enthrals. Within the compendium individual writers reveal their own sources so the effect is like a Russian doll of mysteries within mysteries. The editors are to be praised for uniting these threads into a rare and colourful garment.