This course is intended as an introduction to the last fifty years of British and Irish verse concentrating on the work of seven major poets (Donald Davie, Philip Larkin, Charles Tomlinson, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney) with a glance at more recent work (Peter Reading and Paul Muldoon) and at women's poetry (Patricia Beer and Eavan Boland). An introductory lecture attempts to set the scene and give an overview, but the emphasis is on the work of individual poets. A coursework essay is required by Monday 30th October. It should take the form of a review of a single volume of poems (not a Selected or Collected Poems) by any of the poets named above, or by a living British or Irish poet whose work may be found in the Library. Please note that our subject is British (and Irish) poetry, not American, which would merit a course of its own.

To help you in your work an Information Services team led by Chris Grogan from the library, has collaborated with us to create a set of web pages for the course, with hyperlinks both to our own library resources and to a range of interesting sites. The idea is to make more poems more readily accessible to you and to involve you actively in the search for knowledge and the enjoyment of poetry. Many of these sites present the texts of living poets and those of the recent past. Some of them give you access to critical material and discussion groups. In addition we will have our own on-line exchange and discussion page, giving you the chance to comment on classes and swap ideas and information. I hope you will find this fun, as well as useful. Part of the first-week seminars will be given over to explaining how to use this electronic portal, which is at the leading edge of a wider college strategy (called the SCOLAR project) to develop web-based learning tools. We hope you enjoy the experience and find it valuable.

Martin Dodsworth