Contemporary British and Irish Poetry

Contemporary British and Irish Poetry provides an engaging, stimulating and lively introduction to the subject. Sarah Broom covers poets from a broad range of ethnic and regional backgrounds and explores a wide variety of poetic styles, including well-known names like Seamus Heaney and Carol Ann Duffy alongside more experimental poets like Tom Raworth and Geraldine Monk. The book discusses all of the most compelling issues with which students, readers and writers of poetry are engaged today: 
- class consciousness and economic divisions in society
- political conflict and violence
- gender, sex and embodiment, and the intersections of gender and nation
- race and ethnicity
- the self, subjectivity and agency
- the relationships between the so-called 'mainstream' of British and Irish poetry and 'experimental' and 'performance poetry' communities.

Including close readings of individual poems, and providing a sense of the parameters of the relevant critical and theoretical debates, this is an indispensable guide for all those interested in the work of some of Britain's and Ireland's most successful and exciting contemporary poets.