Fishing By Obstinate Isles

This text investigates modern British poetry and the death of that poetry in American critical circles. It explores the relations of British and American poetries, challenging reductive American views of British poetry.

Tammy L. Brown uses the life stories of Caribbean intellectuals as "windows" into the dynamic history of immigration to New York and the long battle for racial equality in modern America. The majority of the 150,000 black immigrants who arrived in the United States during the first-wave of Caribbean immigration to New York hailed from the English-speaking Caribbean--mainly Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad. Arriving at the height of the Industrial Revolution and a new era in black culture and progress, these black immigrants dreamed of a more prosperous future. However, northern-style Jim Crow hindered their upward social mobility. In response, Caribbean intellectuals delivered speeches and sermons, wrote poetry and novels, and created performance art pieces challenging the racism that impeded their success. Brown traces the influences of religion as revealed at Unitarian minister Ethelred Brown's Harlem Community Church and in Richard B. Moore's fiery speeches on Harlem street corners during the age of the "New Negro." She investigates the role of performance art and Pearl Primus's declaration that "dance is a weapon for social change" during the long civil rights movement. Shirley Chisholm's advocacy for women and all working-class Americans in the House of Representatives and as a presidential candidate during the peak of the Feminist Movement moves the book into more overt politics. Novelist Paule Marshall's insistence that black immigrant women be seen and heard in the realm of American Arts and Letters at the advent of "multiculturalism" reveals the power of literature. The wide-ranging styles of Caribbean campaigns for social justice reflect the expansive imaginations and individual life stories of each intellectual Brown studies. In addition to deepening our understanding of the long battle for racial equality in America, these life stories reveal the powerful interplay between personal and public politics.

This book shows how modernist poetry understood itself to be complicit in the social injustice and unhappiness of its time. It will appeal to general readers with an interest in poetry, to scholars and students interested in the theory of poetry and the history of the concept of poetry, and to scholars and students working in modernist studies and on twentieth-century literature.

Sarah Broom provides an engaging, challenging and lively introduction to contemporary British and Irish poetry. The book covers work by poets from a wide range of ethnic and regional backgrounds and covers a broad range of poetic styles, including mainstream names like Seamus Heaney and Carol Ann Duffy alongside more marginal and experimental poets like Tom Raworth and Geraldine Monk. Contemporary British and Irish Poetry tackles the most compelling and contentious issues facing poetry today.

This book provides an overview of poetry from England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland from the postwar period through to the twenty-first century.

In The Poetry of Saying Robert Sheppard explores an array of ‘experimental’ writers and styles of writing many of which have never secured a large audience in Britain, but which are often fascinatingly innovative. As a published poet in this tradition, Sheppard provides a detailed and thought provoking account of the development of the British poetry movement from the 1950s. As well as analysing the work of individual poets such as Roy Fisher, Lee Harwood and Tom Raworth The Poetry of Saying also examines the influence of the Poetry Society and poetry magazines on the evolution of British poetry throughout this period. The overriding virtue of the poetry of this period is its diversity, a fact that Sheppard has not ignored. As well as providing a fascinating into the work of these poets, The Poetry of Saying offers an ‘insider’s’ commentary on the social, political and historical background during this exciting period in British poetry.

This Companion offers the most comprehensive overview available of modernist poetry, its forms, its major authors and its contexts. The first part explores the historical and cultural contexts and sexual politics of literary modernism and the avant garde. The chapters in the second part concentrate on individual authors and movements, while the concluding part offers a comprehensive overview of the early reception and subsequent canonisation of modernist poetry. As well as insightful readings of canonical poets, the Companion features extended discussions of poets whose importance is now being increasingly recognised, such as Mina Loy, poets of the Harlem Renaissance, and postcolonial poets in the Caribbean, Africa and India. While modernist poets are often thought of as difficult, these essays will help students to understand and enjoy their experimental, playful and fascinating responses to contemporary social and cultural change and their dialogue with the arts and with each other.

This volume introduces students to the most important figures, movements and trends in post-war British and Irish poetry. An historical overview and critical introduction to the poetry published in Britain and Ireland over the last half-century Introduces students to figures including Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and Andrew Motion Takes an integrative approach, emphasizing the complex negotiations between the British and Irish poetic traditions, and pulling together competing tendencies and positions Written by critics from Britain, Ireland, and the United States Includes suggestions for further reading and a chronology, detailing the most important writers, volumes and events