The late Michael Allen was a member of the famous Belfast Group, and one of the most authoritative critical voices on poetry in the North of Ireland. Intimately part of the North's poetic movement since the early 1960s, he taught at Queen's University where he was tutor to Paul Muldoon and a colleague of Seamus Heaney. Allen's precision and subtlety as a poetry critic, and the fact that he was the friend (and often mentor) of poets in Belfast for nearly fifty years, makes him a figure of considerable importance in the field of literary criticism. This important collection of Allen's critical writings on MacNeice, Heaney, Mahon, McGuckian and Muldoon, introduced and edited by Fran Brearton, also publishes for the first time Allen's final work, a ground-breaking study of the dynamics of Michael Longley's career. This fittingly completes the special, often surprising, perspective on modern Irish poetry that Allen's essays collectively constitute, and is indispensable for all those interested in the development of Northern Irish poetry by the man Seamus Heaney called 'the reader over my shoulder'.
