"A Broken Line" - Irish poetic modernisms
communications from the Eiffel Tower - "Intercessions"
"with mullioned Europe shattered" - ""Lough Derg" and Other Poems"
"heart-affairs diplomat" - later poems
Devlin "the thirties generation" and new writers
CODA "no narrative easy in the mind" - the Irish neo-avant garde.
"Alex Davis [has] written a groundbreaking and exciting study in which the general reader and student alike can recognise the true range of Irish poetry and the quite different backgrounds and artistic ambition of poets who happen to come from this country."
Gerald Dawe Irish Times August 2000
"It's encouraging to see an academic in these islands tackling living writers of little official reputation - a brave engagement."
Shearman 43 2000
"crisp, well-informed and well-judged, and ... badly needed to restore the reputation of and interest in the ‘moderns'. UCD Press are to be congratulated: they are setting themselves high standards."
Books Ireland Summer 2000
"The core of this book is a dense discussion of Devlin's poetry in relation to European and Anglo-American modernism ... Davis [also] provides a scholarly, theoretically informed reading of the poets who were left unconsumed during ‘the critical feeding frenzy' that swarmed Northern Ireland poetry during the 1970s and 1980s"
D. R. McCarthy, Huron College CHOICE Feb 2001
"contribute[s] greatly to our understanding not only of the individual poet's work but ... how Devlin took from and contributed to the wider poetic scene, both in Ireland and abroad. Davis [is] to be congratulated for [this] splendid stud[y] which provides many keys to unlocking the work of [this] neglected, but central, mid-century Irish poet."
Irish Studies Review 10 (1) 2002
"an alternative narrative to the dominant Yeats to Heaney line. If certain voices prevail, another few years and ‘Brian Coffey to Trevor Joyce' might be the better sales pitch."
The Year's Work in English Studies 2002
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