About the lecture

In this module, we provide an introduction to the ‘Poems of the Decade’ collection as a whole, before looking in more detail as Patience Agbabi’s ‘Eat Me’. In particular, we focus on: (i) the key context of the decade in which these poems were written (2001-10) and the extent to which the poetry reflects on this context; (ii) the extent to which there is a ‘proper’ subject or language for poetry, cf. Matthew Caley’s ‘Lines Written Upon a Prophylactic Found in a Brixton Gutter’; (iii) the extent to which we can identify the speaker in the poem with the poet herself; (iv) the balance between desire and satisfied desire, and the extent to which the desires of the two figures in the poem can be said to coincide; (v) the question of whether the couple in the poem can be described as happy, or the relationship a healthy one; (vi) the influence of Robert Browning’s ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ (1836); (vii) the intersection of sex, gender and race in this poem and in other contemporary poets and poems, e.g. Grace Nichols’ The Fat Black Woman Poems (1984); and (viii) the echo of Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ (1865) in the title of the poem.

About the lecturer

John McRae is Special Professor of Language in Literature Studies and Teaching Associate in the School of English at Nottingham University, and holds Visiting Professorships in China, Malaysia, Spain and the USA. He is co-author of The Routledge History of Literature in English with Ron Carter, and also wrote The Language of Poetry, Literature with a Small 'l' and the first critical edition of Teleny by Oscar Wilde and others.