William Fogarty's fine book considers how four contemporary poets—Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tony Harrison, and Lucille Clifton—engaged with local speech in order to address (or redress, to borrow Heaney's term) the politics of their historical moment. All these writers have achieved international stature in the mainstream Anglo-American canon; yet they also stand outside the dominant culture to various degrees. Their complicated relationship to the center is reflected in the interplay of nonstandard speech and standard English that runs throughout their entire oeuvre. For Fogarty, these poems testify to the importance of local tongues in canonical Anglo-American verse, beyond the realm of global Anglophone poetry where this topic is usually discussed. Fogarty frames his approach as an example of New Formalism and that critical movement's interest in how form connects to history and politics. Indeed, some of the strongest passages in the book are those in which Fogarty reads specific poems...

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