Book Reviews:The Dail in the 21st century

Book Review

Book Reviews

Birgit Jentsch and Myriam Simard (eds.), International Migration and Rural Areas:
Cross-National Comparative Perspectives, Farnham: Ashgate, 2009, 218pp, (ISBN:
978-0-7546-7484-9), (cloth).

Vergilius Redivivus: Studies in Joseph Addison's Latin Poetry

J.W. Binns, Modern Language Review 101.2 (2006), 504-5:
‘This book is an important contribution to the study of Anglo-Latin poetry in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries … ’Haan provides an able and authoritative account …, setting the poems in their contexts, and providing for each a very clear and penetrating analysis which traces the classical well-springs that lie behind much of Addison’s Latin writing, and also calls attention to non-traditional elements’.

The Great War in Irish Poetry

Second edition, 2003.

The Potency of Pastoral in Hispanic Baroque poetry

This monograph demonstrates that aesthetic and ontological anxieties continue to find diverse expression within the contrived textual artifice of the bucolic space. Drawing upon expansive definitions of the Hispanic literary Baroque, (Beverley, 1980, 2008, Echevarría 1993, Ross 1993, Chemris 2008 , Egido 2009 ) the study analyses the pastoral verse of representative poets of the period to demonstrate that they re-enter an Arcadia that has been defamiliarized but is nonetheless inexorably connected to the classical origins of the mode. Pastoral, in common with other literary forms, is subject to a process of re-evaluation which was latent in its classical legacy. Within the intricacies of this literary construct, surface artistry sustains an effect of artless innocence that is vibrantly contested across the secular, sacred, parodic and colonial text.

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 The book ends with an extended essay, hitherto unpublished: ‘Doubles, Twins and the Feminine: Development in the Poetry of Michael Longley’.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.