The President of Planet Earth
- Submitting institution
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University of Aberdeen
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 100673190
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Carcanet Press
- ISBN
- 9781784104207
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- October
- Year of publication
- 2017
- URL
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-
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- My fifth poetry collection represents significant overlaps with my previous poetry books, but many areas of departure too. The first portion of the book dates from my residence in England, but with my move to Scotland I note a dramatic stylistic shift. The book features a long sequence on the concrete poet and artist Ian Hamilton Finlay, in which I experiment with concrete poetry and engage with styles of radical landscape poetry not to be found in my previous work. The book also features a 14-sonnet sequence on the eighteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Fergusson, composed partly in Scots. With my interest in translation, I am alive to the possibilities of macaronic verse as a vehicle for moving between cultures. I am aware in using Scots of its synthetic aspect for me, as an Irish writer, and also the perhaps puzzling qualities of this language for my readers outside Scotland. Conversely, I was also able to include in the longer, US edition of the book published by Wake Forest University Press a long prose poem memoir of my childhood in Ireland in the 1970s. Though the subject matter speaks of a world familiar to Irish readers, here too an experimental style introduces a prism of defamiliarisation, Among the reviews the book received was an insightful critique by Cal Revely-Calder in the Times Literary Supplement noting the books affinity to the Scottish modernist tradition and the US Objectivist poet George Oppen. Looking back on the volume now, I remain pleased with it as a substantial piece of work, but also one that has taken my work in continuously evolving new directions.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -