Samuel Beckett's Poetry

James Brophy is a lecturer in Modern Languages & Classics, and preceptor in the Honors College of the University of Maine. His scholarship focuses on modern British and Irish literature, poetics, and classical reception studies. His work has appeared in Twentieth-Century Literature, Translation Studies, Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, among other venues. William Davies is a research fellow at the University of Reading. His work on Samuel Beckett includes the monograph Samuel Beckett and the Second World War (2020) and the edited volume Beckett and Politics (2021, with Helen Bailey). He was a contributor to the BBC Radio 4 documentary 'Beckett's Last Tapes' (2019).

• Introduction: The odd poem: Samuel Beckett's poetry William Davies and James Brophy; 1. Weirdness and dislocation in Beckett's early poetry Andrew Goodspeed; 2. Whole fragments: Beckett and Modernist poetics Mark Byron; 3. Pre-echoing the bones: Samuel Beckett's early poems and translations as transpositions Onno Kosters; 4. 'The nucleus of a living poetic': Beckett and his Irish contemporaries Gerald Dawe; 5. Beckett growing Gnomic: the poems of 1934 James Brophy; 6. Different and the same: gender and pronoun in 'Poèmes 1937-1939' Daniel Katz; 7. The missing poème: Beckett's fêtes galantes Mark Nixon; 8. Romanticism and Beckett's poetry Edward Lee-Six; 9. Romance under strain in 'Cascando' John Pilling; 10. Samuel Beckett's self-translated poems Pascale Sardin; 11. Samuel Beckett's translations of Mexican poetry José Francisco Fernández; 12. Beckett's poetry and the radical absence of the (war) dead Adam Piette; 13. Beckett's sound sense William Davies; 14. The matter of absence: the manuscripts of Beckett's late poems Dirk Van Hulle; 15. 'Mocked by a tissue that may not serve': Beckett and the poetics of embodiment David Wheatley; 16. Invoking Beckett: Samuel Beckett's legacy in Northern Irish poetry Hannah Simpson.

'The editors and a distinguished team of contributors have produced a superb collection that leaves no poetic allusion unanalyzed. This book will be a classic of Beckett criticism. Here is scholarship taken to a high degree, adding contexts and glosses to Sean Lawlor's and John Pilling's pionneering work. Everyone interested in Beckett will need to read this engrossing book on the poetry and rediscover Beckett the poet.' Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania, American Academy of Arts and Sciences