The Faber Book Of Beasts

The Faber Book of Beasts is a collection of many of the best poems in English about the creatures who share our planet. The animal kingdom has prompted some of the liveliest and most enjoyable writing by poets, from Homer to our contemporaries. Among the creatures gathered here, tame or wild; common or exotic, are mammals, reptiles, birds, insects, and others perhaps more fanciful than real. A zoologist's delight.There is, too, a moral or philosophical purpose. As Paul Muldoon says in his introduction: 'We are most human in the presence of animals.' And it is just this sense of how our humanity is illuminated by the contemplation of bestial life that he has set out to celebrate. The results are wonderfully rich and thought-provoking.

Aspects of Metamorphosis: Fictional Representations of the Becoming Human explores the various forms of metamorphosis found in literature – mostly modern fiction but informed by earlier examples – and the premises upon which the literature of transformation may be said to depend. Instances of metamorphosis are very widespread in modern literature but as yet there has been no attempt to describe this literary-anthropological phenomenon from a larger perspective. This study approaches such a task. The focus of Aspects of Metamorphosis is on human-animal fictional metamorphoses which embody the concept of becoming-human. Gilles Deleuze describes metamorphosis (especially in Kafka) as the becoming-animal. Across the wide range of examples of literary metamorphosis in different languages and cultures, I describe the becoming-animal as an aspect of the becoming human, a radical approach to mankind’s perception of itself, and restoration to itself, through an animal other. Franz Kafka is in many ways an odd man out in the crowd of modern metamorphosists. Other authors across borders, political, geographical and linguistic, present a humanist and moralist perspective that does not represent a fundamental break with the norms and cultural traditions rooted in the past.

The young rabbit Podkin One-Ear and his allies battle to save their land from the evil Gorm tribe. The Longburrow series is Middle Earth for middle graders! Podkin and his sister and baby brother, Paz and Pook, struggle to keep their ragtag clan of refugees safe from enemies who are destroying the forest in an effort to find them. When they are separated from their clan, the siblings encounter the mysterious and mystical creatures who are the heart of the forest itself. As the fate of all rabbitkind hangs in the balance, the youngsters must recruit these new allies and convince feuding clans to come together in a desperate final battle to defeat the diabolical Gorm. Action and high stakes propel the climactic struggle in the series that shows anyone--even little rabbits--can do great things.

Forty chapters, written by leading scholars across the world, describe the latest thinking on modern Irish poetry. The Handbook begins with a consideration of Yeats's early work, and the legacy of the 19th century. The broadly chronological areas which follow, covering the period from the 1910s through to the 21st century, allow scope for coverage of key poetic voices in Ireland in their historical and political context. From the experimentalism of Beckett, MacGreevy, and others of the modernist generation, to the refashioning of Yeats's Ireland on the part of poets such as MacNeice, Kavanagh, and Clarke mid-century, through to the controversially titled post-1969 'Northern Renaissance' of poetry, this volume will provide extensive coverage of the key movements of the modern period. The Handbook covers the work of, among others, Paul Durcan, Thomas Kinsella, Brendan Kennelly, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Michael Longley, Medbh McGuckian, and Ciaran Carson. The thematic sections interspersed throughout - chapters on women's poetry, religion, translation, painting, music, stylistics - allow for comparative studies of poets north and south across the century. Central to the guiding spirit of this project is the Handbook's consideration of poetic forms, and a number of essays explore the generic diversity of poetry in Ireland, its various manipulations, reinventions and sometimes repudiations of traditional forms. The last essays in the book examine the work of a 'new' generation of poets from Ireland, concentrating on work published in the last two decades by Justin Quinn, Leontia Flynn, Sinead Morrissey, David Wheatley, Vona Groarke, and others.

The contributors to Against Life think critically about the turn to life in recent theory and culture. Editors Alastair Hunt and Stephanie Youngblood shape their collection to provocatively challenge the assumption, rife throughout the humanities, that life needs to be cultivated, affirmed, and redeemed. The editors and their contributors explore how we might be better off daring to think ethics and politics, as well as the project of the humanities, in more radical terms, as a refusal to choose life. What forms of equality and freedom might emerge if we did not organize being-together under signs of life? Taken together, the essays in Against Life mark an important turn in the ethico-political work of the humanities.

Collected over several years of study in the Arts, these essays include subjects including Shakespeare's Othello, Katherine Mansfield, Skelton, Du Maurier, M Puig, PK Dick, Chekhov's Cherry Orchard, Stevenson, Doyle, Voltaire, Heaney, Beckett, Ginsberg, Naipaul, Benin bronzes, Christianity, Metropolis, The Diva, Lonely Londoners, The Dubliners and the seaside for leisure. Essential reading for any student studying english literature and the arts, to assist with their own essays through extended learning.

"Paul Muldoon was looking west long before he left Ireland for the United States in 1987, and his transatlantic departure would prove to be a turning point in his life and work. In America, where he now lives as a US citizen, Muldoon's creative repertoire has extended into song writing, libretti, and literary criticism, while his poetry collections have themselves extended to outlandish proportions, typified in recent years by a level of formal intensity that is unique in modern poetry. To leave Northern Ireland, though, is not necessarily to leave it behind. Muldoon has spoken of his 'sense of belonging to several places at once', and in the United States his work has found another creative gear, new modes of performance facilitated by his Irish émigré status. This book approaches the protean work of his American period, focusing on Muldoon's expansive structural imagination, his investment in Eros and errors, the nimbleness of his allusive practice as both a reader and writer, and the mobility of his transatlantic position. It draws on archival research to produce provocative new readings of Muldoon's later works. Exploring the poetic and literary-critical 'long forms' that are now his hallmark, this book places the most significant works of Muldoon's American period under the microscope, and opens up the intricate formal schemes of a poet Mick Imlah credits as having 'reinvented the possibilities of rhyme for our time'"--

Paul Muldoon and the Language of Poetry is the first book in years that attends to the entire oeuvre of the Irish-American poet, critic, lyricist, dramatist and Princeton professor from his debut with New Weather in 1973 up to his very recent publications. Ruben Moi’s book explores, in correspondence with language philosophy and critical debate, how Muldoon’s ingenious language and inventive form give shape and significance to his poetry, and how his linguistic panache and technical verve keep language forever surprising, new and alive.