<p>Dermot McCarthy has made extensive use of manuscripts, correspondence, and other archival material to uncover the complexity and genius of Gustafson's creativity. He traces Gustafson's development from an early, adolescent romanticism to his later modernist and post-modernist approaches, and situates this progression in the context of the general shifts in poetic approach and theory which took place during the same period. A Poetics of Place surveys not only the life of a poet but the evolution of literary sensibilities from the thirties to the eighties. Rather than force Gustafson's work into a theoretical matrix, McCarthy has avoided critical jargon and fads of literary theory and has focused on Gustafson as a writer, providing a perceptive and detailed analysis of all the major poems and volumes. McCarthy shows Gustafson's appreciation of the local -- his "poetics of place" -- to be a distinguishing feature of his genius. McCarthy allows the reader to return to the poetry itself.</p>

A Poetics of Place: The Poetry of Ralph Gustafson

Literature & Fiction

McCarthy, Dermot

History & Criticism

McGill-Queen's University Press

Word, Woman and Place: Poems, 1971-1985

Goose Lane Editions

<p>In 2005, when John McGahern published his Memoir, he revealed for the first time in explicit detail the specific nature of the autobiographical dimension of his fiction, a dimension he had hitherto either denied or mystified. Taking Memoir as a paradigmatic work of memory, confession, and imaginative recovery, this book is a close reading of McGahern’s novels that discovers his narrative poiēsis in both the fiction and the memoir to be a single, continuous, and coherent mythopoeic project concealed within the career of a novelist writing ostensibly in the realist tradition of modern Irish fiction. McGahern’s total body of work centres around the experiences of loss, memory, and imaginative recovery. To read his fiction as an art of memory is to recognize how he used story-telling to confront the extended grief and anger that blighted his early life and that shaped his sense of self and world. It is also to understand how he gradually, painfully and honestly wrote his way out of the darkness and despair of the early work into the luminous celebration of life and the world in his great last novel That They May Face the Rising Sun.</p>

John McGahern and the Art of Memory (Reimagining Ireland)

Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften

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Books by McCarthy, Dermot