This exploration of poetry and place in Northern Ireland is chiefly concerned with the poetry written since the 1960s. Following on from the introductory first chapter which sets the scene, Chapter 2 focuses on precursor poets, John Hewitt, Louis MacNeice and Patrick Kavanagh. While this triumvirate seemed a natural starting-point, these poets of course pick up rather than originate the debate about poetry and place which is as old as Irish poetry itself. Kavanagh is included even though he hails from outside Northern Ireland (but from within one of the historic nine counties of Ulster – Co. Monaghan), because of the profound and pervasive influence which he has exerted on the poets from the six-county Northern Ireland who came after him, from Seamus Heaney to Sinéad Morrissey. There is no conventional ‘Conclusion’ to the book, a deliberate decision taken in the hope of keeping the idea of an open-ended process in play.

Two chapters in this book revise and expand three essays which have appeared previously. A version of ‘John Montague: Global Regionalist?’ appeared in The Cambridge Quarterly, 35, 1 (2006), and is here expanded to give more detailed discussion of the nature and extent of the American influence on Montague's writing (of) home. Parts of the chapter on Heaney and Muldoon were published earlier in a collection of essays on the work of Paul Muldoon which I edited, Paul Muldoon. Poetry, Prose, Drama.