AbstractThis work is devoted to computations of deflating subspaces associated with separated groups of finite eigenvalues near specified shifts of large regular matrix pencils. The proposed method is a combination of inexact inverse subspace iteration and Newton’s method. The first one is slow but reliably convergent starting with almost an arbitrary initial subspace and it is used as a preprocessing to obtain a good initial guess for the second method which is fast but only locally convergent. The Newton method necessitates at each iteration the solution of a generalized Sylvester equation and for this task an iterative algorithm based on the preconditioned GMRES method is devised. Numerical properties of the proposed combination are illustrated with a typical hydrodynamic stability problem.