Peter McDonald

Does Northern Ireland need `identity'? Does it make sense to discuss politics and literature in such terms? And what does it mean to make a connection between poetry and violence? In this controversial and original study, the Northern Irish poet and critic Peter McDonald examines the poetry of Seamus Heaney, along with work by Louis MacNeice, John Hewitt, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Tom Paulin, Ciaran Carson, Paul Muldoon, and others. He argues against the totalizing ambitions of identity-politics, and questions the value of nationalist assumptions, amongst both Irish and non-Irish critics, for the understanding of Northern Irish poetry. McDonald contends that a close attention to this poetry disables crude analysis and subverts political analogies in terms of `identity'. In a series of subtle and illuminating readings, Mistaken Identities shows how the best poets from Northern Ireland have made an issue of poetic form, and establishes the significance of this for post-nationalist criticism on both sides of the Irish Sea.

Improve your use of tire imprint evidence with the work of an expert. McDonald discusses methods for examining, capturing, and recording imprints, outlines standard procedures for identification, shows how to prepare expert testimony, and provides detailed technical information helpful in identifying imprints.

Since his death in 1963, Louis MacNeice's critical standing has risen steadily. This new study addresses the contexts of MacNeice's writings which are of greatest relevance to his place in modern poetry: his problematic, and still controversial relationship with Ireland and his significance for the understanding of the largely English `thirties generation' with which he is often identified. The influence of these contexts upon the nature of MacNeice's poetic development is studied in detail here together with the important questions of his relation to Yeats and Modernism. The book examines MacNeice's conception of parable as key imaginative response to these influences, and it includes the first study of the poet's revealing and little-known early writings. Peter McDonald demonstrates that MacNeice is a central figure in modern Irish and British poetry of greater substantial complexity than is often thought, and suggests that his through his work we should see its contexts in a challenging new light.