Northern Irish Poetry

Elmer Kennedy-Andrews is Professor of English at the University of Ulster at Coleraine. In addition to his many contributions to journals and edited volumes, he is the author of Writing Home: Poetry and Place in Northern Ireland (2008), (De-)constructing the North: Fiction and the Northern Ireland Troubles (2003), and editor of volumes of essays on Seamus Heaney, Ciaran Carson, Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon.

• Preface and Acknowledgements 1. Transnational Poetics 2. John Montague: 'circling to return' 3. Seamus Heaney: 'the appetites of gravity' 4. Derek Mahon: 'resident alien' 5. Paul Muldoon: Expatriate Transnationalism 6. Ciaran Carson: Indigenous Transnationalism 7. A Widening Circle Notes Bibliography Index

“It is a book probably best suited to an American audience as a well-researched and extremely readable introduction to Northern Irish poetry that uses connections to America—experiential, imaginative, geographic, and literary—as starting points for its commentary. … Kennedy-Andrews’s book is indeed wide-ranging in scope and demonstrates the author’s obvious scholarly enthusiasm for the Northern Irish poetry addressed.” (Gail McConnell, breac.nd.edu, February, 2017)“In his fascinating recent study Northern Irish Poetry: The American Connection, Elmer Kennedy-Andrews contends that there are ‘webs of connection’ … that tie together Northern Irish poets with one another and with their American antecedents, whether or not they are aware of these entanglements. … makes a convincing case for the importance of American influence in contemporary Northern Irish poetry. Additionally, it paves the way for future criticism with a similarly flexible and inquisitive attitude.” (Tara Stubbs, Irish Studies Review, May, 2016)