Abstract
Mark Goodwin has established a reputation as a poet of rural and wild landscapes, mostly in the British Isles, and also developed an experimental form of writing (with broken words, within lines or as the result of enjambment, and unexpected gaps between words). This paper discusses how Goodwin’s focus on rural landscapes—and their urban boundaries—is expressed through challenging and playful poetic techniques, how the experimental form of broken words contributes to staging the actual experience of walking the land, and how his rural engages with transformation and the liminal space of what he refers to as the ‘rurban’.
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Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Shearsman Press, Longbarrow Press and Leafe Press for permission to reprint excerpts from their publications. Also to Dr. Anne-Marie Beller for her invaluable input into the writing of this chapter.
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Featherstone, K. (2017). Rural Sites: Transformations and Experiment in the Poetry of Mark Goodwin. In: Haigron, D. (eds) The English Countryside. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53273-8_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53273-8_11
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