Overview

Slightly Magical Irish Poetry and the Long 1990s is a major intervention in the field of Irish literary studies, disrupting conventional divisions and interpretive categories, mixing established poets and new ones, and including poems in English and Irish. McDiarmid argues convincingly for the importance of the ontologically ambiguous or 'slightly magical' mode in recent Irish poetry. She brings her wealth of knowledge in the field of Irish literary and cultural criticism to bear on subjects as whimsical as cats, railroad reveries and hair, and as serious as political critiques of both Irelands during the upheavals of the 1990s. Drawing on the author's conversations with the poets themselves, the book is written in a style that is witty and learned, sophisticated but always accessible.

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9781399550147

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Reviews

Like the best poems, the best critical commentary on poems has the reader coming away with a sense of astonishment — 'how on earth did she do that?' That’s certainly the case with Lucy McDiarmid, a more than slightly magical critic whose aperçus derive from no mere bag of tricks but a proper sense of wonder. -- Paul Muldoon

Author Information

Lucy McDiarmid is a former fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation and of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, a past president of the American Conference for Irish Studies and an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy. She was the first Marie Frazee-Baldassarre Professor of English at Montclair State University. Her most recent monographs are At Home in the Revolution: what women said and did in 1916 (2015), Poets and the Peacock Dinner: the literary history of a meal (2014) and The Irish Art of Controversy (2005).

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