Poetry & Geography

Notes on Contributors: Neal Alexander is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Nottingham. Charles I. Armstrong is Head of the Department of Foreign Languages & Translation, University of Agder. Peter Barry is Professor of English at Aberystwyth University. Scott Brewster is Reader in English and Irish Literature, and Director of English, at the University of Salford. Lucy Collins is Lecturer in English Literature at University College Dublin. David Cooper is Senior Research Associate on ‘Spatial Humanities: Texts, GIS, Places’, a European Research Council-funded project at Lancaster University. Amy Cutler is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate in the departments of Geography and English at Royal Holloway University of London. Katie Gramich is a Reader in English Literature at Cardiff University. Peter Howarth is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature at Queen Mary University of London. Matthew Jarvis is Anthony Dyson Fellow in Poetry at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. Deryn Rees-Jones is Reader and Director of Graduate Studies in the School of English, University of Liverpool. Peter Robinson is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Reading. Andrew Tate is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Lancaster University. Daniel Weston is a Tutor in the School of English at the University of Nottingham.

This collection, from general and magisterial introduction, to incisive and particularising chapters on well-known and lesser-known recent poets, maps poetry like a new geographer, relating rooted place to extensive space, national politics to global economies, bodily spatiality to ecological interrelatedness. Using a variety of recent theories about place and space, these visions of space and spaces never forget that poetic language itself is a way of taking up and holding positions.Robert Sheppard

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Poetry GeographyNeal Alexander and David CooperPart I Placing Selves: Identity, Location, Community1 City of Change and Challenge: Liverpool in Paul Farley’s PoetryCharles I. Armstrong2 Mapping the Geographies of Hurt in Barry MacSweeney and S.J. LitherlandPeter Barry3 Place under Pressure: Reading John Tripp’s WalesMatthew Jarvis4 ‘Still linked to those others’: Landscape and Language in Post-war Welsh PoetryKatie Gramich5 Roaring Amen: Charles Causley Speaks of HomeAndrew TatePart II Spatial Practices: Walking, Witnessing, Mapping6 The Road Divides: Thomas Kinsella’s Urban PoeticsLucy Collins7 ‘I know this labyrinth so well’: Narrative Mappings in the Poetry of Ciaran CarsonDaniel Weston8 ‘Whitby is a statement’: Littoral Geographies in British PoetryAmy Cutler9 ‘Where lives converge’: Peter Riley and the Poetics of PlaceNeal Alexander10 Envisioning ‘the cubist fells’: Ways of Seeing in the Poetry of Norman NicholsonDavid CooperPart III Geopoetics: Landscape, Language, Form11 ‘Wanderer, incomer, borderer/ liar, mother of everything I see’: Jo Shapcott’s Engagement with Landscape,Art and PoetryDeryn Rees-Jones12 John Burnside: Poetry as the Space of WithdrawalScott Brewster13 ‘Water’s Soliloquy’: Soundscape and Environment in Alice Oswald’s DartPeter Howarth14 Roy Fisher’s Spatial Prepositions and Other Little WordsPeter RobinsonNotesNotes on ContributorsSelect BibliographyIndex