Seamus Heaney's prose poetics return repeatedly to the adequacy of poetry, its ameliorative, restorative response to the violence of public historical life. It is a curiously equivocal ideal, and as such most clearly demonstrates the intellectual origins, the humanist character, and the inherent strains of these poetics, the work of one of the world's leading poet-critics of the last thirty years. Seamus Heaney and the Adequacy of Poetry is the first study of the development of Heaney's thought and its central theme. Eschewing the tendency of Heaney critics to endorse or expand on the poet's poetics in largely adulatory terms, it draws on archival as well as print sources to trace the emerging dualistic shape, redemptive logic, and post-Christian nature of Heaney's thought, from his undergraduate formation to the expansive affirmations of his late cultural poetics. Through a meticulous and wholly new examination of Heaney's revisions to previously published prose, it reveals the logical strain of his conceptual constructions, so that it becomes acutely apparent just how appropriate that ambivalent ideal 'adequacy' is. This book takes seriously the post-Christian, frequently religious tenor of Heaney's language, explicating the character of his thought while exposing its limits: Heaney's belief in poetry's adequacy ultimately constitutes an Arnoldian substitute for--indeed, an 'afterimage' of--Christian belief. This is the deep significance of the idea of adequacy to Heaney's thought: it allows us to identify precisely the late humanist character and the limits of his troubled trust in poetry.
John Dennison was born on May 28, 1978 in New Zealand. He is a poet who has also published poetry of another New Zealand poet - James Baxter. Dennison became a well-known poetry performer in Dunedin, New Zealand, during his time there in 2003-2007. In "Ko te Pakeha te teina: Baxter's cross-cultural poetry", Dennison explores "the potential of Baxter's engagement to inform an understanding of Pakeha identity"--the theme of Dennison's Master of Arts dissertation at the University of Victoria, Wellington, New Zealand.
In April 2007, Dennison was awarded the highest value scholarship from the New Zealand Tertiary Education Commission. The scholarships awarded by the New Zealand Government were embroiled in controversy, when Opposition MPs criticised the award of $96,000 for the study of bogans. Dennison's scholarship was awarded to fund his doctoral research at St Andrews University, Scotland, looking at the ways in which Heaney¿s poetry addresses political conflict in Northern Ireland.
In 2015, Dennison published his first volume of poetry, 'Otherwise'. It was published simultaneously by Carcanet in the United Kingdom and Auckland University Press in New Zealand. It made The New Zealand Best Seller List.
