Natalie Pollard – författare

This is a book about contemporary literary and artistic entanglements: word and image, media and materiality, inscription and illustration. It proposes a vulnerable, fugitive mode of reading poetry, which defies disciplinary categorisations, embracing the open-endedness and provisionality of forms. This manifests itself interactively in the six case studies, which have been chosen for their distinctness and diversity across the long twentieth century: the book begins with the early twentieth-century work of writer and artist Djuna Barnes, exploring her re-animation of sculptural and dramatic sources. It then turns to the late modernist artist and poet David Jones considering his use of the graphic and plastic arts in The Anathemata, and next, to the underappreciated mid-century poet F.T. Prince, whose work uncannily re-activates Michelangelo's poetry and sculpture. The second half of the book explores the collaborations of the canonical poet Ted Hughes with the publisher and artist Leonard Baskin during the 1970s; the innovative late twentieth-century poetry of Denise Riley who uses page space and embodied sound as a form of address; and, finally, the contemporary poet Paul Muldoon who has collaborated with photographers and artists, as well as ventriloquising nonhuman phenomena. The resulting unique study offers contemporary writers and readers a new understanding of literary, artistic, and nonhuman practices and shows the cultural importance of engaging with their messy co-dependencies. The book challenges critical methodologies that make a sharp division between the textual work and the extra-literary, and raises urgent questions about the status and autonomy of art and its social role.

Speaking to You examines our pleasures in, accounts of, and uses for British poetry today. It explores the work of four important poets writing post-1960--Don Paterson, Geoffrey Hill, W.S. Graham, and C.H. Sisson--in order to show how contemporary British poetry's creative handling of addresses to 'you' are key in its interactions with readers, critics, lovers, editors, fellow poets, and deceased forebears. The book lays out clearly, in four sections that focus on individual writers, how saying 'you' operates in contemporary poetry. It shows how lyric address is bound up with poetry's ability to delight, move and tease its public. It puts address into dialogue with a range of familiar literary figures across the ages - namely specific Modernist, Romantic, early Modern, and Classical poets - that will be familiar to scholars and ordinary readers alike.From John Donne to Carol Ann Duffy, T.S. Eliot to Philip Larkin, Keats to Tony Harrison, address has been key in constructing political and personal identities. This book argues that, for contemporary poets - like that of these canonical writers - address is persuasive public interlocution; demanding 'you' rethink regional and historical allegiances.

The first book-length critical study of the contemporary British poet, Don PatersonEight essays by leading literary critics and writers explore the social, historical and personal dimensions of Paterson’s poetry and prose. Situating his work in dialogue with the classical, medieval, early modern, modernist and contemporary voices that inform it, the book considers Paterson as a figure actively negotiating his place within literary history and theory, as well as confronting that history with humour and directness.Key Features:Eight essays by leading literary critics and writers, two interviews with Paterson, a critical introduction and a bibliographyConsiders Paterson’s place in the contemporary British poetry scene, examining the influence of modern American, English and Irish, European and Scottish literature on his writingAnalyses literary qualities across Paterson’s poetry and prose, from his sonnets to his long sequences, his aphorisms to his versions and translationsExamines Paterson’s published theoretical work on poetic form, metre, rhythm and sound and his arguments about lyric practice in his editorial work and his interviews and essaysAttends to key issues in British poetry and publishing, including: translation, national and international identities, spirituality and religion, the contemporary poetry industry, poetry and mathematics, the intersections of poetry, art and music, and psychoanalysis and the body.

Adopting a comparative approach, this book argues that many iconic 21st -century metaphors and images used to communicate climate change and ecological crisis actually conceal the destructive foundations of Anthropocene life.Climate crisis images and narratives produced by the global north have long structured the way environmental change is understood and managed. This open access book examines how apocalyptic 'climate memes' – which are familiar from dominant environmental media, eco-art and science communication – risk invisibilising ecological and social injustices on the ground and perpetuating colonizing and violent planetary responses. The book showcases alternative climate imaginaries emerging from global south, Indigenous-led and anti-colonial movements. Through five case studies in Chile, Greenland, the Pacific Islands, the UK, and Canada, it introduces key contemporary artists, activists and scholars whose creative interventions challenge colonial, extractive, and late capitalist thinking. Among them are the artistic and filmic collaborations, land defence projects, performances and installations of activist artists including Craig Santos Perez, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner and Rita Wong. The book advocates for collaborative, transdisciplinary, and grassroots action in reconfiguring ecological relations, shifting from technocratic solutions to culturally and contextually grounded practices.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The University of Exeter.