Michael Allen: Close Readings: Essays on Irish Poetry

The late Michael Allen was a member of the famous Belfast Group, and one of the most authoritative critical voices on poetry from Northern Ireland, intimately part of the North’s poetic movement since the early 1960s. He taught at Queen’s University, where he was a colleague of Seamus Heaney and tutor to poets such as Paul Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian. Seamus Heaney called him ‘the reader over my shoulder’. Close Readings brings together interlinked critical writings which have crucially influenced approaches to Irish poetry during the last forty years. The book ends with an extended essay, hitherto unpublished: ‘Doubles, Twins and the Feminine: Development in the Poetry of Michael Longley’.

Close Readings contains a Foreword by Fran Brearton, which relates Michael Allen’s essays to continuing critical and cultural debates. Edna Longley’s Afterword offers a personal view of Allen’s involvement with poetry in Belfast.

Andrew Marvell's Latin Poetry: From Text to Context (356pp.)

David Norbrook, Review of English Studies 56 (Sept. 2005), 675-6.
‘We have waited a long time for a study of Marvell’s Latin poetry; fortunately, Estelle Haan’s monograph generously makes good the loss ... One of her most intriguing suggestions … is that Marvell may have presented paired poems like ‘Ros’ and ‘On a Drop of Dew’, and the poems to the obligingly named Dr Witty, to his student Maria Fairfax as his own patterns for the pedagogical practice of double translation. Perhaps the most original parts of the book, however, move beyond the familiar canon to cover the generic range of the Latin verse. Haan offers a very full contextualization of the early Horatian Ode to Charles I in seventeenth-century exercises in parodia. In a rewarding reading of the poem to Dr Ingelo she shows how Marvell deploys the language of Ovid’s Tristia to present Sweden as a place of shivering exile, only to subvert this model with a neo-Virgilian celebration of Christina as a virtuous, city-building Dido. She draws extensively on historical as well as literary sources to offer very detailed contextualizations of the poem to Maniban and ‘Scaevola Scotto-Britannus’... This monograph opens up many new ways into the Latin verse, not least because it is rounded off with new texts and prose translations of the Latin poems. These make a substantial contribution in their own right. They are the best and most accurate translations to date (those in Smith’s edition having some lapses); they avoid poeticisms but bring out the structure of the poems' wordplay very clearly. This book brings us a lot closer to seeing Marvell whole.'

Late referral for assessment of renal failure

It has been recommended that adult patients with a serum creatinine above 150 µmol/l should be referred to a nephrologist for specialist assessment. This study ascertained all patients in Northern Ireland with creatinine above this concentration in 2001 (n?=?19 286 ) to see if this triggered referral within the subsequent year. After exclusion of those who were already known to a nephrologist and those who had acute renal failure, it was found that younger patients and diabetic patients were more likely to be referred. There was no difference in referral rates between male and female patients. However, only 6.5% of all non-diabetic subjects and 19% of diabetic patients were referred within 12 months after a first increased serum creatinine test.

Classical Romantic: Identity in the Latin Poetry of Vincent Bourne

This monograph examines a selection of Vincent Bourne's Latin verse in its classical, neo-Latin and vernacular contexts, with particular attention to the theme of identity (and differing forms of identity). Its aim is to initiate the resurrection from silence of an author whose self-fashioning is achieved by investigating the identity of the self in relation to the other and by foregrounding multiple attempts to fashion other selves.

From Back Cover of published book:

Through close and perceptive analysis of Bourne's negotiation of poetic identity, Haan argues in new ways for the blend of classicism and Romanticism informing his marginalized status. As such, the book promises to revive scholarship on Bourne, and to be of use to students and scholars of Latin as well as vernacular verse.
Carla Mazzio, Professor of English, University of Chicago.


Estelle Haan is the UK's most eminent neo-Latinist. Her books with the APS on Milton (From Academia to Amicitia, Transactions 88, part 6) and Addison (Vergilius Redivivus, Transactions 95, part 2) are both important contributions to our knowledge of those authors, and their scholarship is presented in a way that accommodates the growing number of specialists who do not read Latin. Much of the content of this study is entirely new, and it is written in a way that will make it accessible to non-Latinists. The connections with English-language poets that Professor Haan adduces page after page will be a very considerable resource for students of vernacular poetry.
Gordon Campbell, Professor of Renaissance Literature, University of Leicester.


I have long thought that a modern study of Vincent Bourne was very much needed, and am greatly pleased that one has now been written. Estelle Haan offers a thoughtful and sensitive study that has remarkable depth. She capitalizes on the familiarity with other eighteenth-century English poets about whom she has previously written (Cowper, Gray, and most recently Addison) and she makes use of contempoary literary theory without becoming dependent on any single approach or disfiguring her writing with critical jargon. This work will, one hopes, provoke further research into Bourne and his poetry.
Dana F. Sutton, Professor Emeritus of Classics, The University of California, Irvine.