Tom Paulin is one of the most intelligent and accomplished poets to have emerged from the North of Ireland in recent years. The authority of his political imagination won immediate recognition in the mid-1970s (A State of Justice was a choice of the...

WHO COMES first, the artist or the critic? Until relatively recently there was no doubt about the answer to that question: artists had precedence, critics were followers and latecomers, the humble if sometimes pretentious servants of the work of art. Writers created beautiful...

HERE ARE TWO free-verse views on questions relating to Jewish life from the pen of one poet. The first: m We are fed this inert This lying phrase Like comfort food As another little Palestinian boy In trainers jeans and a white tee-shirt...

In the following essay, Jones offers a comparative analysis of Paulin's The Riot Act and Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy, both of which are adaptations of Greek tragedies by Sophocles.

In the following essay, the critic contends that Paulin's poetry in Walking a Line reveals an avant-garde aesthetic that, like the experimental artwork of Paul Klee, pushes beyond rational experience and political engagement to explore the limits of language and representation.

In the following essay, O'Donoghue provides an overview of Paulin's career and defends the political realism of his poetry as a integral aspect of his artistic imagination, noting Paulin's admiration of James Joyce and placing Paulin within the tradition of European Romanticism.