A transnational poetics /

Offering an insightful study of transnational poetics, Ramazani (Univ. of Virginia) links modernity, transnationalism, and postcolonialism through a network of writers as they find themselves in a multiculture of global technologies and the remnants of the British empire. He makes the reader aware that the categories of identity are always in danger of being co-opted by a larger hegemony, be it US imperialism or the discipline of literary studies. The author deftly negotiates this difficulty by offering thematic chapters and by covering a range of theoretical issues, including transnational poetries, traveling poetry, the relationship between modernism and postcolonialism, decolonization, and the translocal. He traverses these territories with close readings of the work of, among others, Louise Bennett, Kamau Braithwaite, Lorna Goodison, Langston Hughes, Linton Johnson, Claude McKay, Christopher Okigbo, Okot p'Bitek, Derek Walcott, William Butler Yeats, and W. H. Auden. In bringing such a range of writers into proximity, Ramazani allows the reader to contemplate the form and figures of poetry, which makes this study enjoyable as well as important. This volume extends Ramazani's The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (CH, Mar'02, 39-3845) and Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and the Sublime (CH, Mar'91, 28-3755). Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. R. T. Prus Southeastern Oklahoma State University