Читать книгу A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015 - Группа авторов - Страница 9

With such a long, multi‐authored book on such a complex and provocative subject, editors of necessity feel that the reader deserves a few words of explanation before he/she starts to read it.

In our choice of topics and poets, we have been guided by what we felt to be important and useful. We are well aware that another two editors would have approached the field quite differently. We have aimed to open up contemporary British and Irish poetry to a variety of readers in order to give them some sense of the richness of individual poets, genres, forms, techniques, traditions, concerns, and institutions that make up these two distinct but interrelated poetries.

We have encouraged the authors of the essays in this volume to shape their contributions as they thought best. As readers of poetry, we have a fondness, inter alia, for technical analysis of rhythm, meter, and sound. Not all the authors share this interest to the same degree, although all their analyses and interpretations are well‐grounded in the textual material of the poetry they discuss. Such diversity is as it should be. Further, we have allowed authors a latitude in the length of their essays. Some contributions are more concise than others. However, we insisted that the extent of the longer essays be justified in terms of the complexity and interest of the subjects that they address. Further, several essays are provocative and do not bow to established pieties. Again, surely, this is as it should be.

The volume has been several years in preparation. As a result, while we have tried to make sure it is as up‐to‐date as possible, some poets in the meantime may have published additional poems, and commentators published new studies. But this is an inevitable part of discourse in modern and contemporary literary studies.

Readers will be struck by the absence of separate essays on some well‐known and outstanding poets. Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Tony Harrison, and Geoffrey Hill are obvious examples, as is Carol Ann Duffy. We felt that the world did not need another separate essay on Larkin or Heaney, for instance. But a glance at the list of contents and the index to this volume will show that such celebrated poets (eximious within an extravagance of writers) appear continually throughout the volume in discussions of wider issues. In the essays on individual writers, we have chosen poets who deserve greater individual prominence than they have achieved hitherto, or writers who are emerging as major poetic voices.

From a personal perspective, we note with sadness the death of one of our contributors, the gifted poet and critic David Kennedy. In addition, we thank D. M. de Silva for his advice. We also thank the editorial team at Wiley‐Blackwell for their patience and support.

Wolfgang Görtschacher

David Malcolm