Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970 (Wesleyan Poetry Series) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0819522589 ISBN 13: 9780819522580

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press, 1999

Synopsis

The most significant US anthology of innovative poetries from the UK and Ireland in over 25 years.

When most Americans think of contemporary British poetry, they think of such mainstream poets as Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, and Geoffrey Hill. Yet there is a vibrant, diverse alternative poetry movement in the UK, inspired in large measure by the work of such significant mentors as Basil Bunting and J. H. Prynne. There is growing interest in this work in the United States - as alternative American poetries express increasingly transnational concerns - and yet almost none of it is available here.

OTHER is a highly focused anthology bringing together several important strands of English-language poetry that are not otherwise so readily accessible. It includes work by 55 poets, among them Cris Cheek, Brian Coffey, Fred d'Aguiar, Allen Fisher, Ulli Freer, Randolph Healy, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Wendy Mulford, Tom Raworth, Denise Riley, Catherine Walsh; a critical introduction addressing such topics as the interaction of British and American poetic traditions; and brief biographical and bibliographical notes on each poet.

About this title

About the Author

RICHARD CADDEL is a director of the Basil Bunting Poetry Centre, University of Durham, editor of Pig Press, author of three collections of poetry including Larksong Signal (1997), and editor of Basil Bunting: Complete Poems (1994). PETER QUARTERMAIN is Professor of English, University of British Columbia, author of Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe (1992) and Basil Bunting: Poet of the North (1990), and editor of Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Poets, 1880 - 1945 (1986).

Reviews

Though England has seen a spate of recent anthologies of alternative U.K. poetry, this collection marks the first published in the States in more than two decades. Caddel, a noted poet, and Quartermain, a prominent critic of postmodern poetry, collect a diverse and exciting range of work that is evenly balanced between such trends as Caribbean dub poetry; the mellifluous, baroque lyric as it has been developed in Cambridge; London-based performance and concrete poetry; and "outsider" figures such as Bill Griffiths (an independent Anglo-Saxon scholar) and Tom Raworth, whose Reverdy-inspired early lyrics first found appreciation in the States. The compelling introduction portrays a late-millennium English milieu that is marked by overlapping ethnicities and class perspectives, but that traces an experimental tradition "back to Claire, Blake, Smart, and the two Vaughans, Henry and Thomas." The selections from the 55 poets are brief yet excellent. Barry McSweeney, a self-styled Rimbaudian, is represented by a number of terse, direct poems that flaunt provocative language. Denise Riley's subtle, tradition-conscious ear allows lines that are unexpectedly comforting, while Raworth's "That More Simple Natural Time Tone Distortion," a sonic joy-ride of one- to three-word lines that bristle with pixilated narrative, is a contrast to his traditional short lyric "Out of a Sudden." Tom Leonard's Glasgow Scots, not unlike John Agard's Guyanese-inflected idiom, brings to eye and ear a sweet, confident music that is unlike anything in this country. Veronica Forrest-Thomson, a poet and critic who died at 28; Chris Cheek; Maggie O'Sullivan and concrete poet Bob Cobbing are all well represented, as are important figures who guided the influx of New American poetry to the islands: Eric Mottram, Roy Fisher and Andrew Crozier. This is an important sourcebook to a literature that is probably more marked by the multiculturalist energy and divergences from the main modernist line than that of the United States.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0819522589
• ISBN 13: 9780819522580
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 312
• Editor: Caddel Richard, Quartermain Peter