The public life of poetry today means different things to different people. To some it is Carol Ann Duffy writing a laureate poem on the banking crisis or Geoffrey Hill attacking her for mistaking ‘cast off bits of oligarchical commodity English’ for the language of art. To others it might be a hastily assembled anthology of poems protesting the war in Iraq or a display of high-voltage postmodernism by Keston Sutherland on the same subject. John Redmond considers the treatment of public and private spheres in contemporary poetry and the way in which these concepts inform its reception. His principal aim is to counter the lazy application of political rhetoric to literature in ways that appear to make sense of poems but don’t - ‘the determination to read poetry in publicly oriented ways, the determination to make it fit with one kind of public program or another.

A prime instance of this occurs in Redmond’s revisiting of one of the great poems of our time, Derek Mahon’s “A Disused Shed in Co Wexford”: ‘Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel, / Among the bathtubs and the washbasins / A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.’ While “A Disused Shed” has always been read in the light of Northern Ireland’s Troubles, there is little consensus as to what it might be saying on that subject, once we apply critical ‘determination’ that it should deliver a translatable allegory of its dark times. To Seamus Deane, it is about waiting for the nightmare of violence to end and history to begin. To Tom Paulin and Hugh Haughton, Mahon’s mushrooms give a voice to the victims of political violence, while to Seamus Heaney the mushrooms are identified with Unionist power, speaking with the ‘pre-natal throats’ of Mahon’s Protestant ancestors.

But as Redmond quite reasonably asks, what manner of violence are Mahon’s mushrooms supposed to have endured? His argument is that the poem longs to escape from history altogether. When it invokes Pompeii and Treblinka it does so in a vein of deliberate overstatement and desperation. Redmond’s point is not that it uses these disasters to talk obliquely about the Falls and Shankill’s stereophonic nightmare, but that it is registering the pressure of sincerely and strenuously not wanting the theme of the Troubles pressed on it at all. Yet this is not to call Mahon’s poem ahistorical, and even his rejection of poetry’s power to set a statesman right (to paraphrase Yeats) still situates it in the public realm from which it attempts to break free. Nor, to Redmond, is there any escape for Mahon from the impossibly high achievement “A Disused Shed” represents.

In his 2007 study Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence, John Osborne gave a master class in rumbling critics for attacking assumptions which they themselves had placed in Larkin’s poems, and here Redmond does something similar with over-interpretations of the contemporary lyric. Is a boyishly innocent Glyn Maxwell poem really a critique of consumerism and reification, courtesy of its ‘dialogism’ and ‘polyphony’? When Redmond suggests it isn’t, he does so not for anti-intellectual reasons. He is a pragmatist, concerned above all else to read poetry in ways most useful to the poems themselves.

Redmond has an enviable knack for telling asides (‘Maxwell, we might say, divided Auden into eleven parts and threw ten away’, Burnside is a ‘taxidermist on an epic scale’), but there is wisdom as well as wit in his throwaway style. Other chapters examine Plath’s influence on Seamus Heaney, David Jones and WS Graham, and another discusses Irish poetry and feminism. Redmond’s chief exhibit here is a poem by Vona Groarke and a contested reading by the critic and anthologist Selina Guinness. The debate hinges on whether a closing reference to a boiler ‘shunt[ing] the here and now into one full clause’ is or isn’t a description of female sexual pleasure. This is close reading as spectator sport, carried out with real gusto and sense of discovery.

Where I found myself diverging from Redmond was a chapter on Robert Minhinnick and eco-poetry. Drawing on Rortyan pragmatism, Redmond insists that natural disasters are poignant only from our human point of view and ‘not because they are breaking an imaginary law of nature’. There are no natural laws, only human laws. Redmond wishes to condemn sentimental identifications with the non-human world, but while a poem in the voice of a dodo must speak across an unbridgeable divide, the pragmatic uselessness of the exercise can just as easily be an opportunity for hard-headedness as for self-delusion. A poet of the natural world such as Jane Yeh works in this way. Denis Donoghue wrote that pragmatism has ‘nothing to say of first or last things’. What Rorty lacks as a tool for the understanding of poetry, I would suggest, is a sense of the tragic dimension.

Nevertheless, there is a cut and thrust to Redmond’s work. ‘The dominant culture of contemporary poetry is promotional in outlook and anti-intellectual in spirit,’ he says despondently at one point. Thankfully alternatives can still be found - as in this fine book.