Animals in Irish Literature and Culture spans the early modern period to the present, exploring colonial, post-colonial, and globalized manifestations of Ireland as country and state as well as the human animal and non-human animal migrations that challenge a variety of literal and cultural borders.

Animals in Irish Literature and Culture spans the early modern period to the present, exploring colonial, post-colonial, and globalized manifestations of Ireland as country and state as well as the human animal and non-human animal migrations that challenge a variety of literal and cultural borders.

Editors Eva Bourke and Borbala Farago present a timely and important anthology of poems by sixty-six poets, from all over the world, who have made their homes in Ireland and who contribute to, challenge and ultimately broaden the definiton of what is thought of as 'writing from Ireland'. "As its subtitle suggests, Landing Places is an anthology of immigrant poets living in Ireland. Of course it is not accidental that we, as editors, should be interested in and absorbed by the work of such writers since it touches upon our own personal lives. Both of us are ourselves immigrants to this country, and both of us are poets. Both of our families have a narrative of displacement, emigration, religious and political persecution reflecting centuries of a European history of war, expulsions, racism and ethnic cleansing. We know that, whether voluntary or forced, it is never easy to end one life and begin another elsewhere, leaving family and friends, one's familiar places and the sounds of one's language behind." -from The Introduction

This book offers a wide-ranging analysis of the entire corpus of Medbh McGuckian's published work. Its objective is to provide both a readable synthesis of existing criticism, in a fashion which will be generally useful to academics and students, and also to offer an original contribution to the field of contemporary Irish literary studies on the basis of new research. The book investigates a variety of previously neglected themes, in particular McGuckian's exploration of ideas of creativity and performativity in her poetry. Over the past two decades McGuckian has been recognized by both her fellow poets and by literary critics as one of the most original, daring and important poetic voices in contemporary Ireland. Since 1982 she has published fifteen volumes of poetry, extraordinary not merely for its sustained quality and linguistic and technical virtuosity, but also for its constant evolution and reinvention. This book provides an original perspective on her work both thematically and methodologically. From a thematic perspective, the process of artistic creation is a key preoccupation of McGuckian's poetry which recurs in every volume of her oeuvre but has previously escaped critical attention. By adapting and refining theories of singularity and creativity, the book allows for a coherent analysis of this central aspect of McGuckian's work. Methodologically it differs from previous studies in the scope of its approach. Uniquely, it pursues its investigation across the entire breadth of the poet's published output and emphasizes the thematic unity of individual volumes in the light of the poet's constant change and development. Throughout the book, the reading of McGuckian's work concentrates on poems in their entirety, an approach which has not figured to any notable degree in the existing secondary literature on the poet, not least because of the perceived difficulty of her writing. A critical investigation, however, which respects both the integrity of the individual poems and the internal coherence of her various volumes allows for a far deeper understanding both of the poet's thematic preoccupations and of the evolution of her distinctive poetic voice.

Editors Eva Bourke and Borbala Farago present a timely and important anthology of poems by sixty-six poets, from all over the world, who have made their homes in Ireland and who contribute to, challenge and ultimately broaden the definiton of what is thought of as 'writing from Ireland'. "As its subtitle suggests, Landing Places is an anthology of immigrant poets living in Ireland. Of course it is not accidental that we, as editors, should be interested in and absorbed by the work of such writers since it touches upon our own personal lives. Both of us are ourselves immigrants to this country, and both of us are poets. Both of our families have a narrative of displacement, emigration, religious and political persecution reflecting centuries of a European history of war, expulsions, racism and ethnic cleansing. We know that, whether voluntary or forced, it is never easy to end one life and begin another elsewhere, leaving family and friends, one's familiar places and the sounds of one's language behind." -from The Introduction