A History of Irish Women's Poetry

Description

A History of Irish Women's Poetry is a ground-breaking and comprehensive account of Irish women's poetry from earliest times to the present day. It reads Irish women's poetry through many prisms - mythology, gender, history, the nation - and most importantly, close readings of the poetry itself. It covers major figures, such as Maire Mhac an tSaoi, Eavan Boland, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, as well as neglected figures from the past. Writing in both English and Irish is considered, and close attention paid to the many different contexts in which Irish women's poetry has been produced and received, from the anonymous work of the early medieval period, through the bardic age, the coterie poets of Anglo-Ireland, the nationalist balladeers of Young Ireland, the Irish Literary Revival, and the advent of modernity. As capacious as it is diverse, this book is an essential contribution to scholarship in the field.

Ailbhe Darcy is Senior Lecturer in creative writing at Cardiff University and the author of Imaginary Menagerie (2011), Subcritical Tests (2017), in collaboration with S. J. Fowler, and Insistence (2018), which won Wales Book of the Year, the Roland Mathias Poetry Award and the Pigott Prize for Poetry, Ireland's largest poetry prize, and was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize. David Wheatley is a reader in English and Creative Writing at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of Contemporary British Poetry (Palgrave, 2015), and five collections of poetry, including The President of Planet Earth (Carcanet, 2017). Among the awards David has won are the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize.

'Thanks to ground-breaking volumes such as this one, the radiant light of women's poetry will no longer be extinguished and obscured. One of the achievements of this volume is the decision to describe the literary scene not only by drawing on well-known major figures but also by including often overlooked or under-researched writers, depicting a cultural panorama of complexity and multiplicity. ' Pilar Villar-Argaiz, Estudios Irlandeses 'a comprehensive overview covering everything from medieval Ireland to the present day.' Erin Cunningham, Times Literary Supplement