Professor Joanna Gavins is Chair in English Language and Literature at the University of Sheffield, where she teaches courses in cognitive linguistics, stylistics, and ecolinguistics. She is the author of Poetry in the Mind: The Cognition of Contemporary Poetic Style (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), Reading the Absurd (Edinburgh University Press, 2013) and Text World Theory: An Introduction (Edinburgh University Press, 2007).

• Acknowledgements; List of FiguresChapter One: Reading PoetryChapter Two: Time and SpaceChapter Three: IntertextualityChapter Four: AbsenceChapter Five: PerformanceChapter Six: MetaphorChapter Seven: Poetry in the MindReferences

Great poetry places on-stage the powers and limits of human thought. Time and space, intertextuality, presence and absence, performance, metaphor: Gavins investigates masterfully what the poetry of our day teaches us about the human mind.