This fascinating book comprises in-depth interviews with 22 of Northern Ireland’s leading poets, including Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Michael Longley, Medbh McGuckian, Cathal O'Searcaigh, and James Simmons. The poets interviewed were all born after 1920; each poet has published at least one volume of poems. Arranged chronologically by each poet’s date of birth (to cover poems written in subsequent, if not always consecutive decades) this collection deals with a body of poetry that has increasingly attracted critical attention. The book aims to serve the reader interested in poetry as the student of Irish poetry in general and northern poetry in particular by encompassing as wide a range of poets as is possible within the confines of a single volume so as to include both established and less well known voices. Successive interviews explore the poet’s work and development, the social/historical context and the impact of assimilated influences. If the interviews explore a poetry often rooted in the North they also suggest the individuality and diversity of this poetry, of work whose imaginative range is not circumscribed by either literal borders or critically convenient categories. In a period marked by both the troubles and accelerating change these poets’ voices represent a sane and humane search for places where, as Derek Mahon put it, ‘a thought might grow’ and these interviews explore and honour the energy and life in a poetry that was often missing from the social sphere. Full list of interviewees: Seamus Heaney; James Simmons; Paul Muldoon; Seamus Deane; Michael Longley; Derek Mahon; Tom Paulin; Frank Ormsby; Medbh McGuckian; Ciaran Carson; Robert Greacen; Cathal O Searcaigh; Conor O'Callaghan; Gerald Dawe; Colette Bryce; Moyra Donaldson; John Montague; Jean Bleakney; Roy McFadden; Martin Mooney; Padraic Fiacc; Cherry Smyth
