Michael Allen: Close Readings, Essays on Irish Poetry - Fran Brearton

Michael Allen was a member of the famous 'Belfast Group' of Ulster poets in the 1960s, and one of the most authoritative critical voices on poetry in the North of Ireland until his death in 2011. Intimately part of the North's poetic movement, he taught at Queen's University where he was tutor to Paul Muldoon and a colleague of Seamus Heaney. Allen's precision and subtlety as a poetry critic, and that he was the friend and mentor of poets in Belfast for nearly fifty years, made him a significant figure in the broader field of Irish literary criticism and a vital presence in the cultural and literary life of Northern Ireland. This important book collects Allen's critical writings on Kavanagh, MacNeice, Heaney, Mahon, McGuckian and Muldoon, and presents for the first time Allen's final work, a ground-breaking study of the dynamics of Michael Longley's extraordinary career. This fittingly completes the special, often surprising, perspective on modern Irish poetry that Allen's collected essays constitute, and is indispensable reading for anyone interested in the development of Irish poetry during the twentieth century, by the man Seamus Heaney called 'the reader over my shoulder'.