Tongue of water, teeth of stones : Northern Irish poetry and social violence

In a 1984 lecture on poetry and political violence, Seamus Heaney remarked that ""the idea of poetry was itself that higher ideal to which the poets had unconsciously turned in order to survive the demeaning conditions."" Jonathan Hufstader examines the work of Heaney and his contemporaries to discover how poems, combining conscious technique with unconscious impulse, work as aesthetic forms and as strategies for emotional survival.In his powerful study, Hufstader shows how a number of contemporary Northern Irish poets, including Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon, Tom P