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. Sissons--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.

This is the first collection of critical essays on the prize-winning contemporary British poet, Don Paterson. In 10 original chapters, leading literary critics and writers discuss the social, historical and personal dimensions of Paterson's poetry and prose including Rain, Orpheus, Landing Light, The Eyes, God's Gift to Women, Nil Nil, The Book of Shadows and Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets. A critical introduction and an opening interview with Don Paterson clearly situate his work in dialogue with the Modernist, Movement, contemporary and theoretical voices that inform it. The book shows that Paterson is a figure who actively negotiates his place within literary history, as well as confronting that history with lyric grace, humour and directness. It is the first critical study of Don Paterson's writing. Web-based recordings by Don Paterson of the poems that are discussed in the volume available on the EUP website. 10 new critical essays, by contributors including Derek Attridge and John Kinsella, an introduction, an interview with Don Paterson, a biography and bibliography. It explores Paterson's Scottish contexts, his aphorisms, his poetic theory and lyric practice, his sonnets, his irony and modes of speech as well as translation, spirituality, father-son relations, the poetry avant-garde and poetry publishing.

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.