Fran Brearton 
Michael Allen Close Readings 

Michael Allen was a towering figure in the Northern Irish poetry scene and a leading critic of modern Irish poetry. This important book collects Allen’s critical writings on Kavanagh, Mac Neice, Heaney, Mahon, Mc Guckian and Muldoon, and presents for the first time Allen’s final work, a ground-breaking study of the dynamics of Michael Longley’s extraordinary career. This fittingly completes the special, often surprising, perspective on modern Irish poetry that Allen’s collected essays constitute, and is indispensable reading for anyone interested in the development of Irish poetry during the twentieth century, by the man Seamus Heaney called ‘the reader over my shoulder’.