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‘This book makes an important intervention into debates about influence and contemporary Irish poetry. Supported throughout by incisive reflections upon allusion, word choice, and formal structure, Keating brings to the discussion a range of new and lesser known voices which decisively complicate and illuminate its pronounced concerns with inheritance, history, and the Irish poetic canon.’ - Steven Matthews, Professor of English Literature, University of Reading, UK, and author of Irish Poetry: Politics, History, Negotiation and Yeats As Precursor This book is about the way that contemporary Irish poetry is dominated and shaped by criticism. It argues that critical practices tend to construct reductive, singular and static understandings of poetic texts, identities, careers, and maps of the development of modern Irish poetry. This study challenges the attempt present within such criticism to arrest, stabilize, and diffuse the threat multiple alternative histories and understandings of texts would pose to the formation of any singular pyramidal canon. Offered here are detailed close readings of the recent work of some of the most established and high-profile Irish poets, such as Paul Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian, along with emerging poets, to foreground an alternative critical methodology which undermines the traditional canonical pursuit of singular meaning and definition through embracing the troubling indeterminacy and multiplicity to be found within contemporary Irish poetry 1. Introduction: Spectres of Irish Poetry -- 2. Paul Muldoon’s Horse Latitudes: Absence, Interdependence, and Death -- 3. Source Texts and Authorial Identity in Medbh McGuckian’s “The Good Wife Taught her Daughter” -- 4. Paul Durcan and the Death of the Parent in Daddy, Daddy and The Laughter of Mothers -- 5. The Unreality of Time and the Death of the Sibling in the Poetry of Tom French -- 6. Bilingualism and the Death of the Dual Tradition in Celia de Fréine's imram odyssey -- 7. The Death of the Poem: Geoffrey Squires’s ‘texts for screen’ -- 8. Conclusion.-
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