Poetry Displacement

The last hundred years have been an era of unprecedented displacements: the accelerated drift of rural populations to the metropolis, the spread of these cities into successive empires, and the resulting diasporas that have forged the modern United States and any number of smaller nations. These processes have fostered a poetry of exile and expatriation intimately bound up with the experience and culture of modernity. Poetry and Displacement is a thought-provoking and challenging examination of globalized displacement in the work of some of our most critically-acclaimed poets, including Christopher Middleton, Philip Larkin, and Derek Walcott.

The paradigmatic figure of twentieth-century history is the ‘displaced person’, a concept which emerged from the demographic migrations, deportations and genocidal purges that accompanied two world wars, the destruction and construction of nation states and the restructuring of the global order which they occasioned. These processes almost inevitably fostered a poetry of exile and expatriation intimately bound up with the experience of modernity and the culture of modernism, culminating, in the postcolonial era, with the globalisation of displacement as the determining condition of postmodernity. In this timely new volume renowned poetry critic Stan Smith examines a number of poets – Plath, Larkin, Heaney, Walcott, Middleton, Fisher, Duffy – through the lens of displacement.

With poetic play and an ardent humanity, Magdalena Zurawski wrestles with the global and constant struggle for justice inherent to contemporary life.

Traditionally, Wordsworth’s greatness is founded on his identity as the poet of nature and solitude. The Wordsworthian imagination is seen as an essentially private faculty, its very existence premised on the absence of other people. In this title, first published in 1987, David Simpson challenges this established view of Wordsworth, arguing that it fails to recognize and explain the importance of the context of the public sphere and the social environment to the authentic experience of the imagination. Wordsworth’s preoccupation with the metaphors of property and labour shows him to be acutely anxious about the value of his art in a world that he regarded as corrupted. Through close examination of a few important poems, both well-known and relatively unknown, Simpson shows that there is no unitary, public Wordsworth, nor is there a conflict or tension between the private and the public. The absence of any clear kind of authority in the voice that speaks the poems makes Wordsworth’s poetry, in Simpson’s phrase, a ‘poetry of displacement’.

Harrison's astute if uneven debut stages a contest between memory and geography. On the one hand, she writes about retrospect, regret, elegy: my father gone into the long/ raveling of sidereal years was gone into coffin/ three days before someone remembered he had/ children somewhere. On the other hand, she cannot help imagining travel, new vistas, escapes: one such poem, Peace, asks us to cherish brief moments before dawn when you believe/ in other beds, lose possibilities,/ before you don your life like a B-movie/ unlovely and badly cut. A former photojournalist, Harrison thinks in panels, exposures, frames: her quiet free verse neither undercuts nor much enhances her concise symbols: You were the kite I used/ to learn to love the wind. Given her insistence on change and travel, Harrison's final section (poems about home and houses) can seem predictable. So can her efforts at descriptive epiphany: the sky like some/ porcelain cup/ crazed and limned. In her best moments, Harrison extends her poetic sympathies beyond herselfinto the sunlight or the outlines of a new place, in a kite, in the rain or in the migrating monarch butterfly, bitter with the weedy milk/ and his endless, vacant nations. (July) Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Diaspora constitutes a powerful descriptor for the modern condition of the contemporary poet, the spokesperson for the psyche of America. The poems in American Diaspora; Poetry of Displacement focus on the struggles and pleasures of creating a home-physical and mental-out of displacement, exile, migration, and alienation. To fully explore the concept of diaspora, the editors have broadened the scope of their definition to include not only the physical act of moving and immigration but also the spiritual and emotional dislocations that can occur-as for Emily Dickinson and other poets - even in a life spent entirely in one location. More than one hundred and thirty contemporary poets reflect and mediate, rage and bless, as they tell their own stories. In short, this is an anthology of American poetry that draws upon the sensitivity, tenderness, rebelliousness, patience, and spirituality that point to the future of our nation.

Human displacement has always been a consequence of war, written into the myths and histories of centuries of warfare. However, the global conflicts of the twentieth century brought displacement to civilizations on an unprecedented scale, as the two World Wars shifted participants around the globe. Although driven by political disputes between European powers, the consequences of Empire ensured that Europe could not contain them. Soldiers traversed continents, and civilians often followed them, or found themselves living in territories ruled by unexpected invaders. Both wars saw fighting in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the Far East, and few nations remained neutral. Both wars saw the mass upheaval of civilian populations as a consequence of the fighting. Displacements were geographical, cultural, and psychological; they were based on nationality, sex/gender or age. They produced an astonishing range of human experience, recorded by the participants in different ways. This book brings together a collection of inter-disciplinary works by scholars who are currently producing some of the most innovative and influential work on the subject of displacement in war, in order to share their knowledge and interpretations of historical and literary sources. The collection unites historians and literary scholars in addressing the issues of war and displacement from multiple angles. Contributors draw on a wealth of primary source materials and resources including archives from across the world, military records, medical records, films, memoirs, diaries and letters, both published and private, and fictional interpretations of experience.

Design, Displacement, Migration: Spatial and Material Histories gathers a collection of scholarly and creative voices—spanning design, art, and architectural history; design studies; curation; poetry; activism; and social sciences––to interrogate the intersections of design and displacement. The contributors foreground objects, spaces, visual, and material practices and consider design’s role in the empire, the state, and various colonizing regimes in controlling the mass movement of people, things, and ideas across borders, as well as in social acts that resist forced mobility and immobility, or enact new possibilities. By consciously surfacing echoes, rhymes, and dissonances among varied histories, this volume highlights local specificity while also accounting for the vectors of displacement and design across borders and histories. Design, Displacement, Migration: Spatial and Material Histories shows displacement to be a lens for understanding space and materiality and vice versa, particularly within the context of modernity and colonialism. This book will be of interest to scholars working in design history, design studies, architectural history, art history, urban studies, and migration studies.