Poetry & Geography examines the rich diversity
of geographical imaginations informing post-war and
contemporary poetry in Britain and Ireland. Drawing
impetus from the spatial turn in the humanities and
social sciences, the fourteen essays collected here
appraise the significance of ideas of space, place, and
landscape for 'mainstream' and 'experimental' poets,
post-romantics and neo-modernists alike. Cumulatively,
the book's varied articulations of poetry and geography
sketch out a series of intersections between language
and location, form and environment, sound and space.
Poetry's unique capacity to invigorate and expand our
vocabularies of site and situation, of our manifold
relations with the world outside us, is described and
explored. Bringing together fresh, interdisciplinary
readings of poets as diverse as Roy Fisher and R.S.
Thomas, John Burnside and Thomas Kinsella, Jo Shapcott
and Peter Riley, Alice Oswald and Ciaran Carson, Poetry
& Geography sketches a topographical map of shared
poetic terrains. It contributes to a fertile set of
dialogues between literary studies and cultural
geography in which the valences of space and place are
open to processes of contestation and reimagining. This
new collection of critical essays provides readers with
a vital set of coordinates in a complex and evolving
field. Key themes include: place and identity; literary
cartographies; walking as trope and spatial practice;
the poetics of edges, margins, and peripheries;
landscape, language, and form.
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