WILLS, Clair

PERSONAL:

Female. Education: Oxford University, M.A., Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Office—School of English and Drama, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Rd., London E1 4NS, England. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Queen Mary University of London, London, England, reader in English and Irish literature; writer.

WRITINGS:

Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1993.

Reading Paul Muldoon, Bloodaxe Books (Newcastle upon Tyne, England), 1998.

Editor of "Contemporary Writing" section, Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing.

SIDELIGHTS:

Clair Wills's areas of interest include Irish poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, feminist theory, and the intersection between poetics and politics in Northern Ireland. Her book Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry offers a close reading of several contemporary poets, including Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, Ciaran Carson, and Tom Paulin. In Contemporary Literature, Anthony Bradley commended Improprieties for its "sense … that contemporary Irish poetry cannot be understood apart from the political and cultural crisis through which Ireland is passing, and that criticism of poetry must be concerned with the whole culture. This is the right direction in which to go."

Reading Paul Muldoon expands upon the commentary Wills presents in Improprieties. She reviews Muldoon's work chronologically through "sometimes brilliant and always exemplarily thorough readings of individual poems," to quote Chris Greenhalgh in the Times Literary Supplement. Greenhalgh went on to note that Wills is a "genuinely outstanding" interpreter of Muldoon's oeuvre and that her commentaries "return us, newly illuminated, to the verse."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Choice, November, 1999, D. R. McCarthy, review of Reading Paul Muldoon, p. 543.

Contemporary Literature, fall, 1996, Anthony Bradley, review of Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry, p. 481.

Times Literary Supplement, November 19, 1999, Chris Greenhalgh, "The Mule."*