This powerful new perspective on MacNeice's life and work explores his
poetry, prose and drama as part of a biographical re-evaluation: a
certain knowledge of the poet's personal background will help us to
understand him, for his language is to some extent personal. These
words, the poet's own, have never been more fully realised in a single
piece of work; Christopher Fauske places the poet's relationship with
Ireland, the Second World War, his father and the key women in his life
at its centre, unravelling unprecedented considerations that challenge
the critical foundations of this luminary of Irish writing. MacNeice's
experiences and poetry provide a fascinating intersection, illuminated
further by his penetrating criticism and celebrated radio work. An
unstable upbringing, ill-defined nationality and tempestuous love life
ally themselves to a deeply uncertain body of work which, nonetheless,
maintains a life-affirming poetic. Fauske engages product, process and
material reality in this fastidious book that pays long-overdue heed to
MacNeice's heroic directive: 'Let every adverse force converge.'
[Subject: History, Irish Biography, Literary Criticism]
