Tom Paulin

Minotaur Poetry and the Nation State

The Day-star of Liberty

The Invasion Handbook is the first instalment of Tom Paulin's ambitious new poem about World War II. It evokes Weimar culture, Hitler's rise to power, the beginnings of the persecution of the Jews, and ends with the Battle of Britain. This poem of war affirms the struggle and the memory of a generation upon whom the doors of living memory are now closing - and looks at the relation of art to war and to questions of national identity, the search for peace and for a shared civic culture.

The Invasion Handbook

After the success of The Riot Act, his version of Sophocles's Antigone, Tom Paulin turned his formidable powers of transformation on Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound. Commissioned by the Open University, Paulin produced a reworking of the myth, deploying a fluent and sinewy diction laced with the vernacular. As drama it is a brilliant object lesson in what is inessential. Plot and character, even action, are secondary to a gripping, inventive and quasi-futuristic treatment of burning contemporary issues - feminism, the corruption of power and authoritarian politics.

A Version of Aeschylus's 'Prometheus Bound'

Seize the Fire

Sophocles

Antigone

The Book of Juniper is a poet and artist collaboration: a collection of new poems by Tom Paulin with drawings by Noel Connor.

New Poems

The Book of Juniper

One of the most powerful poets of his generation consolidates his reputation as an exceptionally forthright and astringent critic in this book that analyzes the relationship between English-language literature, especially poetry, and nineteenth and twentieth-century politics. Tom Paulin's criticism stays on track, always responsive to a work's characteristic genius and sensitive to its social setting. Each of these essays--on poets ranging from Robert Southey and Christina Rossetti to Philip Larkin, from John Clare to Elizabeth Bishop and Ted Hughes, with a few excursions into the poetry of Eastern Europe for contrast--is informed by a love for poetry and a lively attention to detail. At every turn, Paulin demonstrates the intricate connection between the private imagination and society at large, simultaneously illuminating the kinship between the literature of the past and of the present. He also relates the poetry to themes of nationhood and to ideas about orality, speech rhythms, and vernacular background. Minotaur exemplifies the sort of general, accessible criticism of the arts that will interest a wide range of readers.

Poetry and the Nation State

Minotaur

Hugh Haughton

Gary Harrison

Peter Cox

Bridget Keegan

Louise Sylvester

Mary Moyse

The official Journal of the John Clare Society, published annually to reflect the interest in, and approaches to, the life and work of the poet John Clare.

John Clare Society Journal, 17 (1998)

Since his precise, potent and subtle portraits of Northern Irish life first came to public attention in the 1970s, Tom Paulin has been an unmissable writer on the contemporary poetry scene. This selection on his work draws on nearly four decades of poetry and translation, updating and expanding upon the Selected Poems 1972-1990, and showcasing the microscopic detail and reinvention of the ordinary with which Paulin writes of place, culture and memory. The Ireland of Paulin's childhood is explored both from a personal and a historical perspective to form a complex picture of a country in turmoil and in recovery. But Paulin's concerns are as international as they are local, as reflected in his long-standing appetite for European writers, histories and languages. Dialectic and lyrical, original and exploratory, ambitious and provocative, Tom Paulin is one of the defining voices of his generation: brilliantly varied and utterly compelling, as apparent from this New Selected Poems.

New Selected Poems of Tom Paulin

Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Perception

Tom Paulin's first collection since The Road to Inver in 2004, Love's Bonfire sets poems about early life and marriage beside up-to-the minute and minutely registered perceptions of post-settlement Ireland. At the book's centre are delicately inward versions of the contemporary Palestinian poet Walid Khazendar, which resonate with the proximity of other lives, other exiles and destinies, as of an autobiography by other means.

Love's Bonfire

The Secret Life of Poems is a primer which offers a poem - or on occasion an excerpt - succeeding with commentary in which rhythm, form, metre and sources are the order of the day, not ethical commentary or descriptive paraphrase. This brief engagement with forty-seven poems is intended for students and readers of poetry, and seeks to explain how poetry works by bringing into view the hidden order of specific poems.

A Poetry Primer

The Secret Life of Poems

In The Invasion Handbook Tom Paulin sets out to recount the origins of the Second World War. The result is a triumph of technique, a simultaneous vision which proceeds by quotation and collage, catalogue and caption, prose as well as verse - a myriad staging of historical realities through the poet's intense and bitter scrutiny of the particulars of time and place. The volume opens with the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919, which excluded Germany from the community of nations, and with the answering but ill-fated attempt of the Locarno Treaties of 1925 to restore the torn fabric of Europe. It evokes Weimar culture, Hitler's rise to power and the beginnings of the persecution of the Jews, and ends with the Battle of Britain.

"Tom Paulin's new version is robust, flecked with poetry but still down to earth"-Guardian

In a New Version

Euripides' Medea

The Road to Inver gathers the verse translations of Tom Paulin from four decades, and brings together distinguished versions of classical and European poets which have appeared in his previous collections, from Liberty Tree (1983) to The Wind Dog (1999). But The Road to Inver also includes dozens of new and recent translations from the European canon; it is at once a new volume of poetry by Tom Paulin and a personal anthology of European poetry, ranging from Horace to Heine and covering a surprising range of French, German, Russian and Italian poets. The Road to Inver is the richest collection of its kind since Robert Lowell's Imitations.

Translations, Versions, Imitations

The Road to Inver

Amit Chaudhuri

Professor in Contemporary Literature Amit Chaudhuri

This Is Probably The First Instance Of Lawrence`S Poetry Being Discussed In The Light Of Recent Theoretical Developments. It Is Also Certainly The First Time A Leading Postcolonial Writer Of His Generation Has Taken As His Subject A Major Canonical English Writer, And Through Him, Remapped The English Canon As A Site Of `Difference`.

D.H. Lawrence and 'difference'

David Bromwich

Duncan Wu

Stanley Jones

Roy Park

William Hazlitt is viewed by many as one of the most distinguished of the non-fiction prose writers to emerge from the Romantic period. This nine-volume edition collects all his major works in complete form.

The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt Vol 5

The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt Vol 9

David Herbert Lawrence

By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as provide a passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets of our literature.

Poems

D.H. Lawrence

'The Secret Life of Poems' is a primer which offers a poem - or an occasion or excerpt - with succeeding commentary in which rhythm, form, metre and sources are the order of the day, not ethical commentary or descriptive paraphrase.

Tom Paulin

About

Books

Join the club