Poetry & Geography examines the rich diversity of geographical imaginations informing post-war and contemporary poetry in Britain and Ireland. Drawing impetus from the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences, the fourteen essays collected here appraise the significance of ideas of space, place, and landscape for 'mainstream' and 'experimental' poets, post-romantics and neo-modernists alike. Cumulatively, the book's varied articulations of poetry and geography sketch out a series of intersections between language and location, form and environment, sound and space. Poetry's unique capacity to invigorate and expand our vocabularies of site and situation, of our manifold relations with the world outside us, is described and explored. Bringing together fresh, interdisciplinary readings of poets as diverse as Roy Fisher and R.S. Thomas, John Burnside and Thomas Kinsella, Jo Shapcott and Peter Riley, Alice Oswald and Ciaran Carson, Poetry & Geography sketches a topographical map of shared poetic terrains. It contributes to a fertile set of dialogues between literary studies and cultural geography in which the valences of space and place are open to processes of contestation and reimagining. This new collection of critical essays provides readers with a vital set of coordinates in a complex and evolving field. Key themes include: place and identity; literary cartographies; walking as trope and spatial practice; the poetics of edges, margins, and peripheries; landscape, language, and form.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. Ciaran Carson is one of the most challenging and inventive of contemporary Irish writers, exhibiting verbal brilliance, formal complexity, and intellectual daring across a remarkably varied body of work. This study considers the full range of his oeuvre, in poetry, prose, and translations, and discusses the major themes to which he returns, including: memory and history, narrative, language and translation, mapping, violence, and power. It argues that the singularity of Carson's writing is to be found in his radical imaginative engagements with ideas of space and place. The city of Belfast, in particular, occupies a crucially important place in his texts, serving as an imaginative focal point around which his many other concerns are constellated. The city, in all its volatile mutability, is an abiding frame of reference and a reservoir of creative impetus for Carson's imagination. Accordingly, the book adopts an interdisciplinary approach that draws upon geography, urbanism, and cultural theory as well as literary criticism. It provides both a stimulating and thorough introduction to Carson's work, and a flexible critical framework for exploring literary representations of space.

14 September 1766. Prime Minister William Pitt proposes the Columbia Compromise, unifying the Kingdom of Great Britain and her colonies and establishing a framework for North American representation in Parliament. The American War of Independence is over before it begins. This is the history of British North America. This anthology includes nine original stories from six authors. Each delves into events along the timeline between this point of divergence from established history up to the present day, from the uncertainty of early colonial conflicts to the devastation on the front line of the War of Wars, from the politics underpinning a British mission to land a man on the moon to rivalry on the cricket grounds of New England. Accompanied by extensive appendices including maps, biographies, letters and diaries, they collectively describe an alternate history of the sisterhood between a very British North America and Great Britain, the story of Columbia and Britannia.

This monograph offers a decisive reappraisal of both the literary history and the literary geography of Anglophone modernism by focusing attention on poetry from both sides of the Atlantic. Where recent studies of late modernism tend to regard it as an inter-war or mid-century phenomenon, this book contends that the period 1945 1975 marks a major phase of experiment and achievement in late modernist poetry. The author argues that what distinguishes the work of many late modernist poets (such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Basil Bunting, W. S. Graham, David Jones, Lorine Niedecker and Charles Olson) during this period is its multi-layered poetics of place. In part, he suggests, this is due to the engagement of individual writers with contemporary developments in human and physical geography. It is also manifest in the tendency of late modernist poets to foreground the cultural significance of regional and non-metropolitan places in their texts.

14 September 1766. Prime Minister William Pitt proposes the Columbia Compromise, unifying the Kingdom of Great Britain and her colonies and establishing a framework for North American representation in Parliament. The American War of Independence is over before it begins. This is the history of British North America. This anthology includes nine original stories from six authors. Each delves into events along the timeline between this point of divergence from established history up to the present day, from the uncertainty of early colonial conflicts to the devastation on the front line of the War of Wars, from the politics underpinning a British mission to land a man on the moon to rivalry on the cricket grounds of New England. Accompanied by extensive appendices including maps, biographies, letters and diaries, they collectively describe an alternate history of the sisterhood between a very British North America and Great Britain, the story of Columbia and Britannia.