"The central figure of twentieth-century history is the 'displaced person', a concept which emerged from the vast migrations, deportations, purges, massacres and 'ethnic cleansings' that followed two world wars, and the reconfigurations of the global order those wars brought about. Inevitably, it rapidly became too, a metaphor for any individual displaced from his or her origins, whether by choice or necessity, and appropriated by writers and artists to describe a psychological or even metaphysical condition, the characteristic condition of twentieth-century living. This book considers both the poetry of literal displacement in many of its forms, and that poetry which deploys displacement as the metaphor for a general psychological and cultural condition. It examines in detail the poetry of a number of writers such as Iain Crichton Smith, Carol Ann Duffy, Ken Smith, Philip Larkin, Christopher Middleton and Derek Walcott, who have themselves experienced or witnessed to actual displacement, whether of class, culture, or nation, and ranges more widely to address those poets such as Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon and Anne Stevenson and such younger writers as the 'New Generation Poets' who, in the last twenty years particularly, have made displacement part of the metaphysics of their writing."--Jacket.