Output details

Mandeville

This volume consists of poems adapted from the medieval text The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. The research carried out into the text and its historical context are detailed in the author’s essay ‘Rewriting Mandeville’s Travels’. However, the poems are primarily an imaginative response to the original text, one which also involved the artistic and technical challenges of selecting material, adapting it for a contemporary audience and framing it into complete poems. They reflect an interest in poetic narrative, in the use of syllabic form, in the technique of defamiliarisation, and in the relationship between history and fantasy. The book can be seen in the context of the tendency of contemporary British poetry to explore and adapt historical literary material, including Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf, the Homeric adaptations of Christopher Logue, Simon Armitage and Alice Oswald, and Armitage’s versions of Arthurian literature, as well as Tiffany Atkinson’s Catulla sequence, also included in this REF submission. It seeks to move beyond the concept of the poetry ‘collection’ as a set of individual subjective lyrics to that of an artistic whole united by theme or subject matter found outside the self.