Eric Falci is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Continuity and Change in Irish Poetry, 1966-2010 (2012) and the Cambridge Introduction to British Poetry, 1945-2010 (2015), as well as a number of essays on twentieth-and twenty-first-century Irish and British poetry. Along with Paige Reynolds, he is the co-editor of Irish Literature in Transition, 1980-2020 (2020). His first book of poetry, Late Along the Edgelands, appeared in 2019.

• Introduction; 1. Attention and Play; 2. Worlds and Selves; 3. Feeling Thought; 4. Recollection; Conclusion.

'Drawing on an ample range of contemporary sources, Falci explores how poetry uses its formal wiles and intuitive craft to respond to the world it must answer to and which inflects its thinking, language choices and physical stance. A stylish, provocative and exhilarating book, it will serve both poets and readers to probe the effects of a good poem, and how it succeeds in achieving them.' Vona Groarke, The University of Manchester