This anthology of poems and interviews is a double revelation for readers, presenting the important English-language Welsh poets of the 1980s and 1990s, and illuminating the complexity, constant flux, and political implications of the poet's sense of inherited culture. These poems have been rigorously selected to showcase the Welsh poets' skill and seriousness, and the sensuous density of their language, which, like that of contemporary Irish poets, offers the reader a striking depiction of the landscape and society.

Anomalous States is an archeology of modern Irish writing. David Lloyd commences with recent questioning of Irish identity in the wake of the northern conflict and returns to the complex terrain of nineteenth-century culture in which those questions of identity were first formed. In five linked essays, he explores modern Irish literature and its political contexts through the work of four Irish writers--Heaney, Beckett, Yeats, and Joyce.
Beginning with Heaney and Beckett, Lloyd shows how in these authors the question of identity connects with the dominance of conservative cultural...