Theo Dorgan’s new collection contains many moving elegies for lost friends but also some of the most moving and beautiful love poems written by any poet writing in English over the last few decades.

A study marked by brilliant analyses of some remarkable works of poetry and fiction written by US authors in the first half of the twentieth century allows us to hear inflections of voice that owe much to an enchantment with Ireland – that ‘Celtic parcel of irresistible allure’.

Anne Carson’s work is marked by a sense of the strange and a belief in the value of difficult art in forcing us to test known limits and forms of understanding.

If Brian Moore’s work seemed “outsiderish” to the young Heaney in 1962, what must he have made of Hutchinson? He had been “outside” Ireland for well over a decade at this point, learning the languages of greater Europe – Catalan, Galician, Galaico-Portuguese, as well as French, Dutch-Flemish, and Italian – and forming his poetic identity in relation to poets such as Carner and other Catalan poets like Pere Quart (1899-1986) and Salvador Espriu (1913-1985), to name only a few of the non-Irish and non-Anglophone writers whose work had a major impact on the development of his distinctive poetic voice in the early decades of his career.