Ian Gregson – författare

The books in the Contexts series provide broad-ranging and accessible information about the literary, historical and cultural background of the major periods and genres, Taking its instigation from the ways in which literary texts define their own area of reference within their historical moment, each volume also questions canonical readings of its period, and contains relevant extracts from contemporary documents to aid further discussion.

Ian Gregson maintains that the most exciting poetry in Britain is being written in Wales. In this book, he demonstrates how contemporary Welsh poets, including Robert Minhinnick, Gwyneth Lewis, Oliver Reynolds and Stephen Knight and many others, have evolved techniques to explore the most pressing issues in today's culture; for example, their poems express their anxieties about environmental issues and the damage inflicted on the third world by global capitalism. It also explores how questions about language have acquired such significance, a particularly urgent theme for Welsh poets. Nevertheless, these poets also draw upon the traditional themes of poetry, often using traditional poetic forms such as rhyming stanzas which are given a vivid and modern slant through their use of contemporary language.

This monograph analyses the use of caricature as one of the key strategies in narrative fiction since the war. Close analysis of some of the best known post-war novelists, reveals how they use caricature to express postmodern conceptions of the self. In the process of moving away from the modernist focus on subjectivity, postmodern characterisation has often drawn on a much older satirical tradition which includes Hogarth and Gillray in the visual arts, and Dryden, Pope, Swift and Dickens in literature. Its key images depict the human as reduced to the status of an object, an animal or a machine, or the human body as dismembered to represent the fragmentation of the human spirit. Gregson argues that this return to caricature is symptomatic of a satirical attitude to the self which is particularly characteristic of contemporary culture.

This book discusses how masculinity is represented by women poets and gay poets - but, most of all, how it is represented by straight male poets.

A recipient of an Eric Gregory Award as a young poet, Ian Gregson’s debut collection, Call Centre Love Song went on to be shortlisted for a Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Described by Carol Rumens as ‘combining a postmodernist’s sense of ‘things being various’ with a traditionalist’s concern for shape and completeness’, Gregson’s work is formally diverse, eminently accessible and packed with wit, but this is never glib or throw-away. There is deep commentary going on in these poems, on how we make and break connections, on the possibilities and limits of language and perception. Brilliant, often funny, frequently poignant and always timely, The Slasher and the Vampire as Role Models, is a new and collected that shows Gregson at the height of his linguistic dexterity as poet with something real to say.‘Gregson’s work is characterised by a belief that poetry should include and incorporate modern experience and not simply cordon off a special lyric arena where the world stops and ‘poetry’ begins.’ — Patrick McGuinness

This book is designed to introduce Simon Armitage to those studying him at school and university, and is built around detailed and accessible readings of his most important poems. It contains the most basic and important information about Armitage’s life and work, but is especially good at explaining the concepts which shape Armitage’s poetry, so that its readers will be able to differentiate their performance from that of other students. Simon Armitage is one of the most compelling figures in contemporary literature, most conspicuously because of his charismatic style, but also because he has brought into poetry an irreverent, streetwise gusto and a kind of knowledge that often seems to come from outside poetry altogether. This book nonetheless shows that he is a considerable intellectual whose key concerns include space and place, and gender, and it demonstrates how those concerns work in action, line by line, image by image, in the detail of the poems.