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"James Simmons's long poem 'No Land is Waste' incorporates many of the themes that occur with regularity across his oeuvre: the role of the poet in modern society (and the very nature of society in postwar Britain); the value of labor; the class system; the education system; the aging process; the search for intimacy; exile (voluntary and involuntary); and Simmons’s own fraught relationship with the English literary canon."
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"Who has the right to demand an apology, and for whom can they demand it? What forms might an apology take? When is an apology not an apology?"
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"Can we claim Lola Ridge as an Irish poet, given the peripatetic nature of a life divided between the country of her birth (from which she emigrated as a child), New Zealand, Australia, and the United States? She might be more accurately thought of as a transnational writer, and certainly her poetry bears no obvious resemblance to the work being produced by her Irish contemporaries during the country’s ‘literary revival’, with its avowedly nationalist agenda."
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"What might an ‘accessible form’ look like? If the formal conservatism of the lyric has been ‘strengthened’, to what is this a reaction? What is the role of the Irish poet in twenty-first century society, and what role does poetic form have to play in this conversation? What might it mean to ‘turn private experience into public comment’ at a time when the third wave of feminism is cresting?"
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"In a context where discussion of Northern Irish periodical culture has largely been focused on later efforts, the importance of this magazine has been obscured. Notwithstanding a few important contributions to the critical landscape surrounding Boyd's endeavour, there exists a paucity of scholarship on its production and intervention in the North’s literary tradition."
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"McGuckian's collection trades only to an extent in ‘sweet refusals’ of external violence. A 1983 collection by McGuckian’s contemporary Paul Muldoon is troubled by similar anxieties surrounding physicality and disintegration, both poetic and bodily. In idiosyncratic and provocative ways, each collection speaks to its historical moment, grappling with questions of what political agency poetry might have and of how writers might seek to represent violence."