Poetry and islands: materiality and the creative imagination

In all cultures and times, the poetic imagination has fed on the natural attributes of islands.

An island is either a destination, or a home, or a place of exile and imprisonment, or simply a place to sojourn.

It is an ideal vehicle for journeys treated as allegories, or for acts of finding that turn into acts of losing, or the reverse transformation.

An island is both a place in itself and a pretext for imaginings that need a local habitation and a name.

It can give relief, and pleasure; or it can frustrate, isolate, and negate.

Above all, it both invites and resists - or contains or constrains - the imagination.

This book explores how islands become repositories of human longings and desires, a locus for some of our deepest fears and fantasies.

It balances historical and geographical reference with a selective approach to poems and poets in English, and in translations into English.