Irish Poetry and the Visual Arts

For more than a century, Irish poetry has enjoyed a privileged relationship with the visual arts. This book shows how intensely this creative rapport has been cultivated. Its importance for our age becomes apparent from an in-depth discussion of the work of nine poets whose combined output extends from the 1960s to the first quarter of the new millennium: Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Eavan Boland, Paul Durcan, Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon and Sinéad Morrissey. The focus falls on the ways in which the images addressed in their poems are thematically framed by particular pictorial genres or modes: the portrait, the still life, the conversation piece, history painting and abstraction. These creative frameworks provide the thematic rationale for the book’s five chapters, cumulatively demonstrating how a consistent engagement with the visual arts has bolstered the appeal of contemporary Irish poetry in global cultures.