Publisher's Synopsis
Poetry. Edited by Thomas Rain Crowe with Gwendal Denez and Tom Hubbard. Translated by many hands. In this long overdue collection of contemporary Celtic language poets, A CELTIC RESURGENCE offers a first comprehensive look in English at poets from Wales, Brittany, Scotland, Ireland, Cornwall and Isle of Man writing in Welsh, Breton, Scottish Gaelic, Irish Gaelic, Cornish and Manx. Along with poets who are legendary and household names in their native countries, such as Sorley MacLean, Bobi Jones and Anjela Duval, are more than fifty of the new young voices of modern Celtic literature. In tone, these voices of The New Celtic Poetry are equally as sensitive as they are subversive. In this they mirror the struggle and resiliency of a century of language activist-writers who have defied the attempts at cultural genocide by the English and the French and have continued to write and speak their languages. The result of that staying power is evidenced in a ground swell of literary activity during the last half of the twentieth century in all six Celtic countries represented in this book. Introduced to many for the first time, these, then, are "The New Celts." The progeny of hundreds of years of ancient cultural tradition, yet as modern as anything being written anywhere in the world today."Just by the very existence of the Celts and the Celtic traditions that have survived, this is subversive!" Bobi Jones"It is a very different type of romanticism that has been predicated of the Gael and his poetry. The special brand of romanticism attributed to the Gael and his poetry is a romanticism of the escapist, otherworldly type, a cloudy mysticism, the type suggested by the famous phrase 'Celtic Twilight.' I suppose that many with Celtic pretensions will be shocked at the declaration that Gaelic poetry has not less but more than common realism." Sorley MacLean"
