"Hadfield also shows how Spenser's immersion in the Irish countryside, with its "wilde fruit and salvage soyle", seeps generously into the imagined landscape of his poetry, transmuting the realities of this Elizabethan Wild West into the airy fantasies of an Elizabethan Narnia." Charles Nicholl • Guardian "Nonetheless Spenser is now high on the list of great poets that nobody reads. Just about the only thing that Karl Marx had in common with Philip Larkin was a loathing for Spenser." Colin Burrow • Literary Review "The challenging poet who emerges here appears closer to later Anglo-Irish writers - Swift, Yeats, MacNeice, C.S. Lewis, even Beckett (perhaps especially Beckett) - than he does to his English contemporaries. There are affinities too with Joyce in terms of exile and language. Hadfield's is not the postcolonial Spenser targeted by Edward Said, but a semicolonial author closer to Said's reading of Yeats as a "poet of decolonization"."Willy Maley • THE

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