"Although Richard Rankin Russell is wise enough to realize that pocts are not `legislators of the world,' whether acknowledged or unacknowledged, he argues convincingly that Seamus Heaney and
Michael Longley have nurtured the process of reconciliation in war-torn Northern Ireland. By concentrating on the way they have addressed the violence that has ruined so many lives in their
home country, Russell makes a significant contribution to the scholarship that surrounds them and their peers. He also teaches us how the imagination that makes art can also make peace." Henry
Hart, College Of William And Mary
"Richard Rankin Russell shows clearly there are strands of reconciliatory feeling, desire, and attitude that bind the poetry of Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley together. He demonstrates on
the strength of this reconciliatory aesthetic how these poets ought to be considered together in critical intimacy. Along the way, Russell draws profitably on some interesting and occasionally
little-known thinkers on religion and the sacred." John Wilson Foster, University Of British Columbia
"Russell's book takes a worthwhile and relatively unusual approach to criticism of modern poetry from Northern Ireland, by combining in-depth study of two poets, and putting these figures in
the context of what he calls `reconciliation'---that is to say, the evolving peace-process in contemporary Northern Ireland, along with the history of its long gestation through the years of
the Troubles. Russell believes that art---and in this case the art is poetry---made a difference to political and cultural developments in Northern Ireland over the past thirty and more years,
and that this difference was one for the better, contributing to the political developments that delivered (or at least have so far seemed to deliver) an end to violence in the Province." Peter
Mcdonald, Oxford University
