Słowa kluczowe

the First World War |women’s war poetry |Jenny Lewis |Yrsa Daley-Ward |Imtiaz Dharker |Malika Booker |Rupert Brooke |colonialism

Streszczenie

Turning to the First World War patriotic narrative of “for ever England,” epitomised by Rupert Brooke and his writing as the point of departure, this paper investigates 21st century commemorative women’s poetry written during the First World War centenary years and its subversive interaction with this traditional war narrative. This article argues that while the public discourse on war memory often turned to the idea of a “shared past” between the UK and former colonies, thus “sanitising” the history of colonial violence (as argued by Santanu Das), poems by Yrsa Daley-Ward, Malika Booker, Imtiaz Dharker, and Jenny Lewis written for commemorative anthologies effectively decolonise the narrative(s) of the First World War by opening up the space for new voices and construing the image of England beyond “for ever England” in its relation to other spaces and other wars.

Słowa kluczowe

contemporary soldier poetry |the Great War |the War in Afghanistan |intertextuality |mythical transposition

Streszczenie

To this day, the term “soldier poetry” is still predominantly associated in popular perception with the 1914–1918 trench poets, such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, or Isaac Rosenberg. And yet, the dawn of the new millennium, marked by the rise of the global War on Terror, saw a significant revival of the genre in Britain. One of the most noteworthy indicators of this is John Jeffcock’s anthology Heroes (2011), which has col- lected a hundred poems written by British soldiers who fought in recent conflicts – Iraq and Afghanistan in particular. While these poems are framed within the shifting military, socio-demographical, and political dimensions of war in our time, they simultaneously exhibit strong roots within the context of a specific literary tradition that originated in the First World War. This article sets out to analyse a selection of poems from Heroes, focusing on the way these poets construct a network of intertextual citations, borrowings, and allusions to connect their texts – quite deliberately – with the much acclaimed generation of poets form the Great War. The article argues that, by doing so, the poets facilitate the transposition of a set of broader myths and emotions that are typically associated with the Great War onto the new (con)text, thereby adding new literary, cultural, and social meanings to the texts.

Słowa kluczowe

Nat Raha |Jay Bernard |the hostile environment |necropolitics |the New Cross Fire |the Grenfell Tower fire

Streszczenie

The UK’s legislation on immigration in the 2010s has been defined by a hostile environment. This essay traces the ways in which two poets in the UK have responded to, and intervened in, this violent political climate. Through a close examination of Nat Raha’s Of Sirens, Body & Faultlines and Jay Bernard’s Surge, the essay demonstrates how both poets understand the present hostile environment in a wider historical context, and how they consequently make possible a new understanding of our contemporary moment, as well as possible pathways towards resisting the UK’s necropolitical immigration policies.

Słowa kluczowe

contemporary poetry |working-class poetry |Carol Ann Duffy |Simon Armitage |North of England |Midlands

Streszczenie

Since the lost labour struggles of the mid-1980s, (working-class) poets like Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage have progressively asserted their themes across the social strata. Hence, four of their poems are put to closer scrutiny. Especially Armitage’s verse mirrors a tendency in contemporary working-class poetry – frequently located in the North and the Midlands – to reflect on endangered traditions, with no small amount of nostalgia. Yet, its issues – solidarity, equality and historical consciousness – have also been taken up by black and female lyricists. Consequently, the poetry of the new working classes includes the concerns of all disadvantaged people of England (and the world).

Słowa kluczowe

Anthropocene |climate crisis |contemporary poetry |materiality |digital literature |Alice Oswald |J.R. Carpenter

Streszczenie

The article explores the work of two contemporary poets, Alice Oswald and J.R. Carpenter, with reference to the material and immaterial aspects of their poetic projects. It is argued that although disparate in their form, both artists’ works are linked by their interest in the environmental forces as (im)material manifestations of more-than-human agency. In this sense they can be seen as belonging to a longer and broader strain of poetic endeavours (like concrete poetry and land art) that struggle to problematise the relationship between form and meaning. The article also employs the notion of earth scripts which allows to see such poetic and artistic practices as forms of descriptions of the earth characterized by differing degrees of sensitivity to the environmental challenges posed by the Anthropocene.

Słowa kluczowe

appropriation |literary translation |adaptation |Alice Oswald |Authorship |women poets |Lavinia Greenlaw |Jo Shapcott |contemporary English poetry

Streszczenie

One of the most interesting tendencies in contemporary English poetry which arguably will develop further and mark the next decades of writing in England, are works which I would call translation-poems, i.e. texts which problematize the distinction between translations and original works, as well as between authors and translators. One could mention here such books as Jo Shapcott’s Tender Taxes (versions of Rilke’s poems), Alice Oswald’s Memorial (a translation of Homer’s The Iliad), and Lavinia Greenlaw’s A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde (a version of Chaucer’s poem). All three books have been advertised as authored by these English poets; it is only their names that appear on book covers. Significantly, this type of translating, or adapting poetry comes now largely from women writers. Trying to define the blurred genre they are working in, they call it variously: versions, excavations, extrapolations, remixes, etc.

Słowa kluczowe

poetry |meaning |narrative |Simon Armitage |sequentiality |poetry analysis |schema |Glyn Maxwell

Streszczenie

This article discusses the sequential devices which structure lyric poems. The sequentiality of poems is usually given little systematic attention to in poetry analysis. The main focus tends to be on speaker, imagery, theme and prosody. But a central aspect of the meaning of any poem is the manner in which the progression of the poetic utterance is organised. One such device, widely used in traditional and contemporary poetry, is the schema of the narrative. This article briefly sketches a theoretical approach to the description of the sequential extension of poetic texts and applies it to examples from the work of two prominent contemporary English poets, Simon Armitage, the present poet laureate, and Glyn Maxwell.

Słowa kluczowe

narrative verse |novel in poems |verse novel |21st-century English poetry

Streszczenie

A substantial amount of narrative verse has been written and published in England in the first two decades of the 21st century. Several writers, including Bernardine Evaristo, Ros Barber, Patience Agbabi, and Moniza Alvi, have written successful and well-received longer narrative poems. These poems fall into various categories: novel in poems, verse novel, and narrative collection. Five features of these texts are distinguished: the reworking of traditional and popular story materials; the predominant deployment of traditional narrative and narrational technique; accessible verse technique; an interest in past subjects and an attempt to render them available to a contemporary readership; and an adoption of non-narrative and lyric modes.