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This powerful new perspective on MacNeice’s life and work explores his poetry, prose and drama as part of a biographical re-evaluation: ‘a certain knowledge of the poet’s personal background will help us to understand him, for his language is to some extent personal’. These words, the poet’s own, have never been more fully realized in a single piece of work; Christopher Fauske places the poet’s relationship with Ireland, the Second World War, his father and the key women in his life at its centre, unravelling unprecedented considerations that challenge the critical foundations of this luminary of Irish writing.

MacNeice’s experiences and poetry provide a fascinating intersection, illuminated further by his penetrating criticism and celebrated radio work. An unstable upbringing, ill-defined nationality and tempestuous love life ally themselves to a deeply uncertain body of work which, nonetheless, maintains a life-affirming poetic. Fauske engages product, process and material reality in this fastidious book that pays long-overdue heed to MacNeice’s heroic directive: ‘Let every adverse force converge.'