Powerful essays on the state and aims of contemporary poetry.

This thoroughly researched overview on one of the most absorbing literary phenomena of recent decades—the trespassing of cultural and linguistic borders—departs from the canonical point of view offered by the English works of the Nobel laureate, Russian-American poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky, to approach the work of the emerging Hungarian-English poet Ágnes Lehóczky. Through the epistemological filter offered by some guiding texts (such as Bauman, Hall, Braidotti, and many others), this study allows the reader to discover the recounting of a search for an identity, where the adoption of English as an artistic vehicle is only the first thread that unites the two “nomadic” authors. Striving to “locate” language and identity, Brodsky and Lehóczky face the limits of doing so, due to the fluid and nomadic nature of language itself. This suggests, if not answers, then new ways of expression, which draw the language of our future.

This volume of essays emphasizes the common theme that bodies of water may segregate, but, ironically, also unite nations and their readers through the literature that authors from various countries produce. It reveals the importance of valuing literature that, over time, has travelled down bubbling streams, across lakes, along ocean waves, and white-water rivers because fiction, drama, and poetry know neither actual nor artificial boundaries, and, therefore, they cross-fertilize, and even transform, beliefs, practices, and roles across cultures. Topics examined here range from South Africa’s on-going crises that, in part, mirror those of Somalia and Mozambique to poetry that has been reinvented as a literature in movement and to philosopher Henri Bergson’s influence on other philosophers, as well as Nikos Kazantzakis, author of Zorba the Greek. The scholars contributing to this collection hail from across the globe, allowing the work to add to conversations on regional and international literary study, with special emphasis on writings from such places as Japan, Luxembourg, the Caribbean, the United States, Hungary, South Africa, Greece, and Turkey.

This is a book about contemporary literary and artistic entanglements: word and image, media and materiality, inscription and illustration. It proposes a vulnerable, fugitive mode of reading poetry, which defies disciplinary categorisations, embracing the open-endedness and provisionality of forms. This manifests itself interactively in the six case studies, which have been chosen for their distinctness and diversity across the long twentieth century: the book begins with the early twentieth-century work of writer and artist Djuna Barnes, exploring her re-animation of sculptural and dramatic sources. It then turns to the late modernist artist and poet David Jones considering his use of the graphic and plastic arts in The Anathemata, and next, to the underappreciated mid-century poet F.T. Prince, whose work uncannily re-activates Michelangelo's poetry and sculpture. The second half of the book explores the collaborations of the canonical poet Ted Hughes with the publisher and artist Leonard Baskin during the 1970s; the innovative late twentieth-century poetry of Denise Riley who uses page space and embodied sound as a form of address; and, finally, the contemporary poet Paul Muldoon who has collaborated with photographers and artists, as well as ventriloquising nonhuman phenomena. The resulting unique study offers contemporary writers and readers a new understanding of literary, artistic, and nonhuman practices and shows the cultural importance of engaging with their messy co-dependencies. The book challenges critical methodologies that make a sharp division between the textual work and the extra-literary, and raises urgent questions about the status and autonomy of art and its social role.