Punning in Punglish, Sounding ‘Poreign’
This essay explores Daljit Nagra's poetry – Look We Have Coming To Dover! (2007) and Tippoo Sultan's Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger-Toy Machine!!! (2011) – in the context of contemporary British language politics. It argues that Nagra's approach to language – combining heteroglot, multivoiced experimentalism with an etymological attention to the historical constructedness of language – offers a riposte to monolingual ideologies, which also resituates English as a product and residue of colonial history. While Nagra's poems sometimes come close to regarding the histories enfolded within English as a linguistic and poetic impasse, they continue to invest in the notion of resistance and individual agency in language; and specifically, they revel in poetic dramatization of the accommodations and convivialities of everyday multilingual language practice.
Collected Poems, 1948-1984
This book includes most of the poems in each of Derek Walcott's seven collections, as selected by the poet, and the complete text of "Another Life" - a narrative poem of over four thousand lines that J.D. McClatchy, writing in "The New Republic," praised as "one of the best long autobiographical poems in English, with the narrative sweep, the lavish layering of details, and the mythic resonance of a certain classic." "Collect Poems" received the 1986 "Los Angeles Times" Book Prize for poetry
Historical writing in twelfth‐ and thirteenth‐century Scotland: the Dunfermline compilation
This article examines the first three items in a manuscript housed in the Royal Library in Madrid but written at the Benedictine abbey of Dunfermline in Fife, Scotland during the reign of James III (1460–88). It argues that the three items were originally put together during the reign of Alexander III (1249–86) and together formed a compilation which should be viewed as the earliest extant history of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century kings of Scots. Interestingly, the Dunfermline compilation did not stress the Irish ancestry of the kings of Scots, as might be assumed, but instead set its subjects against the backdrop of their Anglo-Saxon descent from the house of Cerdic. The article then considers the relationship of the Dunfermline compilation to Turgot's Vita Sancte Margarete and Aelred of Rievaulx's Genealogia Regum Anglorum and argues that the use of these sources in the compilation suggest that it was put together for a particular political purpose, a purpose for which the Anglo-Saxon ancestry of the kings of Scots had particular relevance.