That island never found

Essays and poems for Terence Brown

Nicholas Allen & Eve Patten editors

That Island Never Found is a collection of poems and essays in honour of Terence Brown by some of Ireland’s leading writers and scholars. In studies of Louis MacNeice, W.B. Yeats and the cultural history of twentieth-century Ireland, Brown has played a central role for decades in the island’s critical imagination. His gifts as a scholar and teacher are recognized here in a series of essays and poems that take literature and history as their subject. Roy Foster, Seamus Heaney, Declan Kiberd, Edna Longley, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon and Helen Vendler are among the writers and the critics to join in celebration of Brown’s contribution to Irish intellectual life. Each provides individual perspective on the complex interactions between writers, their work and society, the attention to which is a sign of Brown’s presence, a commitment to writing and its place that has been foundation to his life in letters. The book contains a new poem by Seamus Heaney written in honour of Terence Brown. It is called Human Chain (for Terence Brown).

Nicholas Allen is the Moore Professor, in the Moore Institute at NUI Galway, and is the author of George Russell (AE) and the New Ireland, 1905–30 (2003). He edited The Cities of Belfast (2003) with Aaron Kelly. Eve Patten lectures in English at Trinity College Dublin. She is the author of Samuel Ferguson and the culture of nineteenth-century Ireland (2004).