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“... populate me animate sensitively the spirit of dwelling behind the big blue harbour storage tanks I would have children in animal masks appearing round lampposts and knowing the names of the boats coming in I desire fishermen come home to sand-floored cottages distant factory boats moored level with the breakwater wall my life has been a series of sailors’ knots tightened and loosed stronger than floodtides and briefly lingering traceries across my palm where the blood knot and perfection loop have slipped through my fingers I have hung out the laundry in front of the house on the Sabbath and had it back through the letterbox I have had it with all but the ship in a bottle the scene becomes sooner or later the heaped rigging unfurled with a yank on a string and the whole salty tale set down and forgotten between lace curtain and window ...”

“... leaving behind     only yourself and     the door unlocked venture down     the avenue for the messages     becoming the street as you go          and keeping an eye out for a hole in your shoe     the dog’s first worda bundle of rye     tomorrow’s papera pub with no beer     a hole in the sky they ...”

“... The Antarctic Poetry School Historically, the absence of even one writer has been the least of the Antarctic School’s worries. Is its hallmark cool tone sustainable in today’s climate? I suspect not, though the Old Antarctic for ‘burning zeal’ is ‘thin ice, beware’ and ‘splash, ha ha’. Most traditional verse forms are too complex to have been ever attempted ...”

“... Eiléan​ Ní Chuilleanáin’s poem ‘Translation’ describes a work scene in a convent laundry. Over the bustle of cleaning and ironing, one voice rises insistently, ‘sharp as an infant’s cry’. Its speaker has been incarcerated for offences against Catholic Ireland and in this brief monologue continues to expiate her shame:Washed clean of idiom • the baked crustOf words that made my temporary name •A parasite that grew in me • that spellLifted • I lie in earth sifted to dust •Let the bunched keys I bore slacken and fall •I rise and forget • a cloud over my time ...”

“... For a country with one of the oldest book-making traditions in Europe, Ireland was a late arrival on the magazine scene: Tom Clyde’s first example is Swift’s Examiner, started in 1710, ‘written purely for English consumption, and reprinted in Dublin, unchanged, only as an afterthought’. A rash of Tatler imitators gave way to more nationally minded miscellanies by the mid-century, but the first golden age of the Irish magazine was the 1790s ...”

“... Among the more unusual relics of the fishing industry in Hull’s maritime museum is a holed fragment of the trawler Mino, sunk off the Dogger Bank in October 1904. At the time, the Russian fleet was making its way from the Baltic to the Pacific the long – the incredibly long – way round, where they hoped to engage the waiting Japanese. Mistaking a group of Hull trawlers for enemy craft they opened fire, a mere 18,000 miles off target ...”

“... Few presences were more imposing in postwar poetry than that of T.S. Eliot, but from his eminence as the Pope of Russell Square, Eliot has now shrunk to something more like a holy ghost. Pound’s right-wing unpleasantness, because so deranged, seems somehow more forgivable, to the huddled ranks of Poundians at least. Critics unimpressed by the psychodrama of Eliot’s Christianity, such as Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler, much prefer Yeats and Stevens ...”

“... If we see him as a second-generation recruit to the ranks of mid-century modernist loners – David Jones, Basil Bunting, W.S. Graham and R.S. Thomas – Finlay’s continued evasion of a biographer acquires honourable precedents. Jones has yet to be biographised (though long-time devotee Tom Dilworth is on the trail), Graham likewise; Justin Wintle’s ...”

“... Marcel Aymé’s novel Le Passemuraille, about a man who can walk through walls, would have interested Thomas Caulfield Irwin (1823-92). Irwin is cited in Paul Muldoon’s To Ireland, I for a neighbourly dispute he was having with one John O’Donovan. ‘He says I am his enemy,’ Irwin wrote, ‘and watch him through the thickness of the wall which divides our houses ...”

“... and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (1987) David Lloyd argues that Mangan’s life ‘appears resistant to a nationalist typology, and it frames a body of work that is equally inassimilable to a nationalist aesthetic’. He doesn’t deny that Mangan often wrote for the nationalist cause, and in the ...”

“... The name​ given to Phillis Wheatley by her family is lost. She may have been born in modern-day Senegal or Gambia, and was called ‘Phillis’ after the ship in which she was forcibly transported to Boston in 1761. Wheatley was the name of the prosperous merchant family who purchased her ‘for a trifle’ – ‘a slender, frail, female child, supposed to have been about seven years old, at this time, from the circumstances of shedding her front teeth’, and dressed in ‘a quantity of dirty carpet’, according to Margaretta Odell, an unreliable Victorian descendant of the Wheatleys ...”

“... out a substantial and authoritative History of Irish Women’s Poetry, edited by Ailbhe Darcy and David Wheatley. A new genealogy of Irish poetry that doesn’t foreground Yeats or Kavanagh but Katharine Tynan and Máire Mhac an tSaoi has come into view.Deane reacted promptly to protests about The Field Day Anthology by commissioning two volumes of ...”

“... the electoral success of the Labour Party. This is not a view that Foster and Woolfson would take. David Howell is concerned with a similar theme: how can we reconcile nationality and socialism? Howell, prompted by the Falklands War (and understandably made more depressed by ‘the sodden summer of 1985’), has tried to answer the question by an examination ...”

“... on virtually unaided until Latham and Matthews came along. The previous standard edition by H.B. Wheatley appeared in ten volumes between 1893 and 1899, a date closer to the original publication in 1825 than to the present. It’s true that Wheatley delivered a much fuller text than his predecessors, omitting only ‘a few ...”

“... are even applauded by his father-in-law, which is not always the case in human affairs. Lord Wheatley, in his admirably modest account of a meritorious Scot’s progress from a Shettleston boyhood to the highest reaches of his country’s legal and political life, offers a magisterial stamp of approval: Tam, he concedes, may be a controversial ...”