'This book makes an important intervention into debates about influence and contemporary Irish
poetry. Supported throughout by incisive reflections upon allusion word choice and formal
structure Keating brings to the discussion a range of new and lesser known voices which
decisively complicate and illuminate its pronounced concerns with inheritance history and the
Irish poetic canon.' - Steven Matthews Professor of English Literature University of Reading
UK and author of Irish Poetry: Politics History Negotiation and Yeats As PrecursorThis book
is about the way that contemporary Irish poetry is dominated and shaped by criticism. It argues
that critical practices tend to construct reductive singular and static understandings of
poetic texts identities careers and maps of the development of modern Irish poetry. This
study challenges the attempt present within such criticism to arrest stabilize and diffuse
the threat multiple alternative histories and understandings of texts would pose to the
formation of any singular pyramidal canon. Offered here are detailed close readings of the
recent work of some of the most established and high-profile Irish poets such as Paul Muldoon
and Medbh McGuckian along with emerging poets to foreground an alternative critical
methodology which undermines the traditional canonical pursuit of singular meaning and
definition through embracing the troubling indeterminacy and multiplicity to be found within
contemporary Irish poetry.
