A World of Local Voices

Poetry in English Today. Edited by Klaus Martens, Paul Morris and Arlette Warken.

Eight critical contributions, dealing with the interplay of aesthetic, cultural, and political forces in contemporary anglophone poetry, are accompanied by five poetic texts by E. D. Blodgett, Jonathan Locke Hart, Jan Horner, Tabish Khair and Margaret Mitsutani, each with a commentary essay. The volume contains papers and poems presented at Saarland University's eponymous international conference (October 22-23, 1999) and the "Day of International Poetry" (October 24, 1999). The conference set out to explore how the modernist tendency towards overarching concepts and a "poetry of ideas" is slowly being superseded by a more modest "poetry of place", which at the same time seems to be loosely subsumed within the unifying medium of English in its various forms. The essays show awareness of the critical debates concerning postcolonialism and intercultural literary relations while also suggesting new paradigms of critical understanding, based on the analyses of individual poetic expression. As a supplement, selected poets and translators have submitted individual poetic texts which are accompanied by commentary essays. 160 Seiten, broschiert (Saarbrücker Beiträge zur vergleichenden Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft; Band 26/Königshausen & Neumann 2003) leichte Lagerspuren