Contemporary Poetry and Postmodernism

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-x

   PDF

2. Introduction

   1. Introduction

      • Ian Gregson

      Pages 1-11

3. Dialogue

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 13-13

      PDF

   2. “But Who Is Speaking”: “Novelisation” in the Poetry of Craig Raine

      • Ian Gregson

      Pages 15-38

   3. “The Best of Both Worlds”: the Hybrid Constructions of Paul Muldoon

      • Ian Gregson

      Pages 39-60

   4. James Fenton: Expert at Cross-Fertilisation

      • Ian Gregson

      Pages 61-83

   5. “Your Voice Speaking in my Poems”: Polyphony in Fleur Adcock

      • Ian Gregson

      Pages 84-96

   6. Carol Ann Duffy: Monologue as Dialogue

      • Ian Gregson

      Pages 97-107

   7. “Grapevine, barge pole, whirlpool, chloride, concrete, bandage, station, story”: some versions of narrative

      • Ian Gregson

      Pages 108-124

4. Estrangement

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 125-125

      PDF

   2. Estrangement and the Retro-Modernists

      • Ian Gregson

      Pages 127-132

   3. Edwin Morgan’s Metamorphoses

      • Ian Gregson

      Pages 133-150

   4. Christopher Middleton: Journeys Broken at the Threshold

      • Ian Gregson

      Pages 151-169

   5. Music of the Generous Eye: The Poetry of Roy Fisher

      • Ian Gregson

      Pages 170-191

   6. A Various Art: Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Denise Riley

      • Ian Gregson

      Pages 192-208

   7. John Ashbery and British Postmodernism

      • Ian Gregson

      Pages 209-237

   8. The Estranging of the Mainstream

      • Ian Gregson

      Pages 238-255

5. Back Matter

   Pages 256-269

   PDF

Contemporary Poetry and Postmodernism explores the fraught relationship between the poetry of the mainstream and kinds of modernist poetry that have had to make their way outside it. Mainstream poets like Paul Muldoon, James Fenton and Carol Ann Duffy multiply voices and so draw on resources from the novel - Bakhtin's concept of the dialogic is therefore used to explain their techniques. By contrast, Shklovsky's concept of 'estrangement' is shown to be more useful in accounting for the radical experimentation of poets like Edwin Morgan, Christopher Middleton and Denise Riley. However, the book concludes by suggesting that - partly because of the influence of surrealism in women poets like Selima Hill and Jo Shapcott - the mainstream has recently been infiltrated by modernist and postmodernist estrangement effects.

• Narrative
• novel
• poem
• poetry
• postmodernism

• University of Wales, Bangor, UK

  Ian Gregson

Ian Gregson

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