A survey of poetry from Northern Ireland, the Republic, Britain and the USA. The five chapters of the book cover the 1950s, 1960s, the early troubles period to 1976, the 1980s and 1990s. Each poet is placed firmly within his or her historical and social contexts, with an emphasis on the response to the processes of modernisation, the representation of violence, poetic form and gender. While the distinctiveness of Northern and Southern poetries is respected, Irish poets are seen to be engaged in a continual process of cross-border exchange. Over 30 individual poets are dealt with, and in each case detailed readings of individual poems are given along with contextual material. While the major critical issues are addressed the book is primarily concerned to break with the small canon of texts and poets which tends to dominate discussions of the subject, and emphasizes a heterogeneity and diversity of achievement. It avoids the imposition of a single interpretation on a diverse body of writing and makes the case for a wider appraisal of Irish poetry which considers international and mainstream influences. It concludes with a discussion of poetry of the diaspora at a time of the fragile Northern Ireland ceasefire and the "Celtic Tiger" phenomenon in the Republic.

Perhaps most famous for UNDER MILK WOOD and his poems 'Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night', and 'Death Shall have no Dominion', Dylan Thomas was a hugely colourful and iconic poet whose work was greatly admired by contemporaries such as Edith Sitwell and Sylvia Plath. He wrote well over 380 published poems as well as 50 journal-published poems, pastiches, poems from letters and radio plays. This new edition of the author's poems looks at his body of work in a new light, including material that was previously overlooked or excluded from collections, as well as bringing to bear advances in critical theory. Most importantly it emphasises how accessible and immediate his work was, demonstrating its relevance to a contemporary audience.

Published in anticipation of the centenary of the poet's birth, The Poetry of Dylan Thomas is the first study of the poet to show how his work may be read in terms of contemporary critical concerns, using theories of modernism, the body, gender, the carnivalesque, language, hybridity and the pastoral in order to view it in an original light. Moreover, in presenting a Dylan Thomas who has real significance for twenty-first century readers, it shows that such a reappraisal also requires us to re-think some of the ways in which all post-Waste Land British poetry has been read in the last few decades.

The reputation of Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century has not waned in the fifty years since his death. A Welshman with a passion for the English language, Thomas s singular poetic voice has been admired and imitated, but never matched.

This exciting, newly edited annotated edition offers a more complete and representative collection of Dylan Thomas s poetic works than any previous edition. Edited by leading Dylan Thomas scholar John Goodby from the University of Swansea, The Poems of Dylan Thomas contains all the poems that appeared in Collected Poems 1934-1952, edited by Dylan Thomas himself, as well as poems from the 1930-1934 notebooks and poems from letters, amatory verses, occasional poems, the verse film script for Our Country, and poems that appear in his radio play for voices, Under Milk Wood. Showing the broad range of Dylan Thomas s oeuvre as never before, this new edition places Thomas in the twenty-first century, with an up-to-date introduction by Goodby whose notes and annotations take a pluralistic approach."

Ethel Ross, the sister in law of Alfred Janes, was the guardian of Dylan Thomas' legacy for decades. Shortly after his death in 1953, She compiled a photo memoir of his haunts in and around Swansea. Ugly, Lovely: Dylan's Swansea and Carmarthenshire of the 1950s in Pictures is a touching collection of Ethel's photos accompanied by quotes from Dylan Thomas' poetry and her own comments. Together they provide an unprecendented portrait of Swansea, Laugharne and Llansteffan in the 1950s, letting the reader see the Carmarthenshire landscape for the first time through the eyes of Wales' most celebrated poet. Ugly, Lovely also contains a rarely seen satirical sketch, 'Lunch at Mussolini's', written by Thomas as a schoolboy. 'This particular sketch he gave to me to put on at the Swansea Little Theatre. In those days I used to write comic sketches for the party held after each show; but it was never produced, probably because I managed in the end to put together something more topical for the society. I still have the script, however.'- Ethel Ross Lunch at Mussolini's offers a vivid and whimsical insight into the early workings of Dylan's mind and a caustic satire of the dictator's life. Patiently preserved by Ethel, the sketch will be published for the first time alongside her photo memoir.

Between May 1930 and August 1935, Dylan Thomas kept numerous notebooks of poems. They contain the drafts of almost all of the work that would form his first two reputation-making collections, 18 Poems (1934) and Twenty-five Poems (1936), and many of those in his third collection, The Map of Love (1939). Thomas sold four of the notebooks, spanning May 1930 to May 1934, to the University of Buffalo in 1941. However, the existence of a fifth notebook, covering the period June 1934 to August 1935, was unknown until 2014, the centenary of his birth. The Fifth Notebook of Dylan Thomas makes this newly-discovered text available to readers and researchers for the first time. It contains the only existing MSS versions of Thomas's most challenging poems, 'I, in my intricate image' and 'Altarwise by owl-light', and fourteen other early poems. It contains facsimiles and full transcripts of the originals, is annotated throughout, and has a full scholarly introduction. Exploring the contexts of these brilliant and experimental lyrics - many with substantial reworkings and variant passages - this landmark publication sheds new light on the creative practice of one of the most important and well-known poets of the twentieth century.

Set in 'South-Wets Wales' Illennium is a cut-up sonnet sequence which draws on recent theories about the social role of shame, as it kaleidoscopically traces the trajectory of a romantic attachment across a tangle of shifting friendships. Mixing disease and end-of-era career discontents, the personal and the personnel, its narratives constantly cohere and fracture under the blown down sign of The No Sign bar, a local watering-hole. Indeed, the more shameless the embarrassment of literary riches the poem shores up, from Shakespeare to Berrigan, Laforgue to Keats, Rimbaud to Dafydd ap Gwilym, the more the chances of emotional and poetic plenitude seem to be thwarted by 'silences stubbed out' on an 'I for an I / in the very temple of delight'. Yet, if the intersection of a personal pathology with the public ones of Clinton's Washington or Blair's Balkans disturbs us here by virtue of its apparent superficiality, it noneless sharply raises the question of how much we really wish to conceal what we think we (really) feel.Moreover, for all its fears of the 'dork inability' of the poet, even of poetry itself, to resist abject collapse, Illennium cannot help being brazen either, revealing itself over and over again to be a peach-succulent, recklessly playful work, whose blushful excesses bear witness to the 'brilliantly pointless' energies of language in lyric form.

Discovering Dylan Thomas is a companion to Dylan Thomas's published and notebook poems. It includes hitherto-unseen material contained in the recently-discovered fifth notebook, alongside poems, drafts and critical material including summaries of the critical reception of individual poems. The introductory essay considers the task of editing and annotating Thomas, the reception of the Collected Poems and the state of the Dylan Thomas industry, and the nature of Thomas's reading, 'influences', allusions and intertextuality. It is followed by supplementary poems, including juvenilia and the notebook poems 'The Woman Speaks', original versions of 'Grief thief of time' and 'I fellowed sleep', and 'Jack of Christ', all of which were omitted from the Collected Poems. These are followed by annotations beginning with a discussion of Thomas's juvenilia, and the relationship between plagiarism and parody in his work; poem-by-poem entries offer glosses, new material from the fifth notebook, critical histories for each poem, and variants of poems such as 'Holy Spring' and 'On a Wedding Anniversary' (including a magnificent, previously unpublished first draft of 'A Refusal to Mourn'). The closing appendices deal with text and publication details for the collections Thomas published in his lifetime, the provenance and contents of the fifth notebook, and errata for the hardback edition of the Collected Poems.

Soleiman Adel Guemar was born and raised in Algiers where he worked as a journalist. He published numerous stories and won two national poetry prizes. In 2002 he left Algeria to seek safety for himself and his family in the UK. 'Sate of Emergency', a representative selection of Guemar's poetry,is rooted in Algerian experience, speaking of urgent concerns everywhere - oppression, resistance, state violence, traumas and private dreams. His poetry sings of life's sensual pleasures in the face of the grotesque morbidity of violent political repression. In the excellent translation by Tom Cheesman and John Goodby, Guemar's poems carry all their native force and brusque wit. In her introduction, Lisa Appignanesi writes: "Soleiman Adel Guemar is almost exactly as old as the independent Republic of Algeria. He has witnessed its terrible history, the crimes against humanity which attended its birth and the enduring 'state of emergency' under which life has been blighted ever since. This volume marks an important moment: a record from the inside of a history which is too palpably of our times...Where before we had only newspaper headlines, we now have a living voice, both political and lyrical - an intensely individual voice which speaks out freely and traces the lineaments of a tragic history. "

Offering an introduction to Irish culture and society, this glossary serves as a routemap for undergraduates to further study. It contains around 400 short and accessible explanations of the key events, figures and concepts in Irish studies since the pre-modern period. From "the Abbey Theatre" and "Bloody Sunday" to "Viking Invasions" and "Oscar Wilde", this glossary gives an interdisciplinary overview of Irish culture and society and offers directions for further reading. Covering literary terms, traditions and movements as well as Irish history, politics, music and art, the entries are fully cross-referenced and assume no prior knowledge making this a useful source of information for students of Irish studies.

"In A True Prize, John Goodby combines wit, virtuosity and a high-keyed but robust intelligence with biographical openness, even vulnerability, in a way that constantly confounds the reader's expectations. Formally more traditional than some of his previous offerings, the book has a swarming richness and a variousness of theme and approach which add up to a really satisfying and intriguing human document. Goodby's mastery of the verse-line is amply and consistently demonstrated thoughout this volume, his phrasing and his fusing of form, idea and perception are always sparky and startling, usually inarguable and very often electrifying." Lyndon Davies -- Publisher: Cinnamon Press