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What are the means available to poetry to address crisis and how can both poets and critics meet the conflicts and challenges they face? This collection of essays addresses poetic and critical responses to the various crises encountered by contemporary writers and our society, from the Holocaust to the ecological crisis.

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Acknowledgements Introduction PART I: THE LIMITS OF EXPRESSION: REPRESENTATION AND IDENTITY Form, Historical Crisis and Poetry´s Hope in George Szirtes´´Metro´; J.Sears Persona, Trauma, and Survival in Louise Glück´s Postmodern, Mythic, Twenty-first Century ´October´; M.K.Azcuy Hern: The Catastrophe of Lyric in John Burnside; S.Brewster PART II: A SPECIAL CASE: CRISIS AND POETRY IN NORTHERN IRELAND ´In a ghostly pool of blood / a crumpled phantom hugged the mud´: Spectropoetic Presentations of Bloody Sunday and the Crisis of Northern Ireland; R.Moi ´The Given Note´ - Traditional Music, Crisis and the Poetry of Seamus Heaney; S.Crosson ´Crisis first-hand´: Seamus Heaney Before and After the Ceasefire; S.Regan The Mundane and the Monstrous: Everyday Epiphanies in Northern Irish Poetry; C.I.Armstrong PART III: SITUATED WORDS: PLACE, ECOLOGY AND LANDSCAPE ´The Memorial to all of them´: Landscape and the Holocaust in the Poetry of Michael Longley; B.Corcoran ´Toward a Brink´: The Poetry of Kathleen Jamie and Environmental Crisis; L.Collins Sounding the Landscape: Dis-placement in the Poetry of Alice Oswald; J.S.Drangsholt Place, Narrative and Crisis in the Long Poems of Paul Muldoon; A.Karhio PART IV: SUSPENDED JUDGEMENTS: RETHINKING POETIC RECEPTION Paul Muldoon: Critical Judgment, the Crisis Poem, and the Ethics of Voice; G.Batten Displacing the Crisis: New British Poetry, Cultural Memory and the Rôle of the Intellectual; E.Mueller-Zettelmann The Body of Text Meets the Body as Text: Staging (I)dentity in the Work of SuAndi and Lemn Sissay; D.Osborne Selected Bibliography Index

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´Focusing on poetry from Britain, Ireland and the USA, Crisis and Contemporary Poetry dissects and discusses a number of controversial issues within poetry...It does this in a totally refreshing and inviting manner, which, by the book´s end, enables one to feel both entriched and enlightened.´ - David Marx Book Reviews

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MARY KATE AZCUY Assistant Professor, Monmouth University, USA GUINN BATTEN Associate Professor of English, Washington University, USA SCOTT BREWSTER Director of English, University of Salford, UK LUCY COLLINS Lecturer in English Literature, University College Dublin, Republic of Ireland BRENDAN CORCORAN Associate Professor of English, Indiana State University, USA RUBEN MOI Assistant Professor and Research Fellow in English and Comparative Literature, University of Troms›, Norway EVA MUELLER-ZETTELMANN Associate Professor of English Literature and Cultural Theory, Vienna University, Austria DEIRDRE OSBORNE Senior Lecturer in Drama, Goldsmiths University of London, UK STEPHEN REGAN Professor of English, University of Durham, UK JOHN SEARS Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK JANNE STIGEN DRANGSHOLT Associate Professor at the Department of Culture and Language Studies, University of Stavanger, Norway

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