Introduction; 1. Women, Poetry, and the Voice of a Nation; Outside History: Women and Nation from Virginia Woolf to Eavan Boland; Women and Poetry. A Question of Authority; 2. The Laureate Roles: Three Poets and a Professor; Poet Laureate; The Ireland Chair of Poetry; Scots Makar and National Poet of Wales; Shared Platforms; 3. Gillian Clarke. From Woman Poet to National Poet; Breaking a Path; Consolidating the role of ‘women’s poetry’ in the 1980s; The Voice of the Tribe; 4. Paula Meehan: Poetry Across Boundaries; Creating Distance; Gary Snyder and Meehan’s Poetry of Breath; Three Female Images of Ireland; Inside History: A Jobbing Poet of the 1990s; 5. Liz Lochhead. Performing Scotland;
Mapping Scotland; Refracting Binaries: From The Colour of Black and White to Fugitive Colours; 6. Carol Ann Duffy. The Edge has become the Centre; ‘The edge has become the centre’; Sincerity; Aphorisms and Authority; ‘Poetry must always change’; 7.Answering Back. Poetry in Conversation with Wordsworth, Burns and Yeats.; Wordsworth; Burns; Yeats; 8. National Poets and the National Curriculum; Four Poems about School; Poetry by Women in the Curriculum, and the Tortured Poem; Gillian Clarke and Carol Ann Duffy in the AQA Syllabus 2004-11 (Series 4);
Curriculum Interventions by Lochhead and Duffy;Questioning Cultural Consensus; 9. Brexit and Britannia 10. Postscript for the Future; Works Cited.