The “Boggle” in the “Waäste”

The year’s work in stylistics 2019

“…The use of dialect is another enduring topic in studies of poetry and forms the focus of the intertextual title No Dialect Please, You’re a Poet (Hélie et al, 2019), a new edited collection from the Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature series. In thirteen highly original chapters, this book examines the use of dialect in the oral performance of poetry as well in written texts and in the poetry of canonical writers - Edney (2019) writes on Tennyson and Brault-Dreux (2019) on D.H. Lawrence for example, and there is coverage of more contemporary wordsmiths too, such as Bosquet’s (2019) chapter on dub poets Linton Kwesi Johnson and Benjamin Zephaniah. The politics of dialect are addressed by Ní Riordáin’s (2019) theoretically diverse insights into the relationship between Standard English and Irish English in the poetry and translations of Seamus Heaney and Greg Delanty, to name just two of the writers in a discussion which is equally diverse in terms of poetic examples.…”