Poetry, Geography, Gender

Poetry, Geography, Gender explores how questions of place, identity, and creative practice intersect in the work of some of Wales’s best-known contemporary poets, including Gillian Clarke, Gwyneth Lewis, Ruth Bidgood, and Sheenagh Pugh. Alice Entwistle illustrates how each writer’s relationship with her complex cultural hinterland—its languages, history, and imaginative and political geography—is staged and tested in the kinds of poems that each poet writes, as well as what she writes about. In doing so, Entwistle proposes a new way of reading both poetry and place, arguing that the Wales represented, in and through their choices of form and language, is precisely the kind of dynamic, outward-looking, and culturally confident nation that theorists of devolution and the fin de siècle might have envisioned.