Poetry and Privacy breaks new ground in exploring the function of, and continuing need for, poetry outside the academic and literary worlds, and investigating the effects of the wider society on the practice of poetry. Redmond’s writing is full of insight into poetry as a whole, as well as offering fresh appraisals of the likes of Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath, John Burnside, W.S. Graham, Derek Mahon, Vona Groarke, Robert Minhinnick, Glyn Maxwell and David Jones. Together they serve as a portrait of British and Irish poetry in a new century in which – in politics, society and poetry – there is a broad sense of an ending.
John Redmond was born in Dublin in 1967. He was educated at University College Dublin and Oxford University. His own poetry is published by Carcanet: Thumb’s Width (2001) and MUDe (2008), and he has also written a textbook, How to Write a Poem (Wiley-Blackwell, 2005). He is now a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Liverpool.