Introduction

Abstract

The originating hope for this collection is that it may be helpful and engaging for readers — those who may be coming for the first time to the small-press publications of some of these writers, and those who may know some of the poetry, perhaps as poets themselves, and who wonder about the working processes involved in it. Some of the writers here figure in recent British anthologies, A Various Art and The New British Poetry,¹ some don’t; this collection might work in part as a vade mecum for the appearing anthologies and for the individual poets’ books, listed here in their bibliographies. There’s a simple promotional impulse behind this compilation, in that a great deal of very good work in poetry in this country is scarcely known, for a stubborn complex of reasons. It would be good to have a clear history of why this is so. But this book doesn’t aim to be that, although it should be of use, indirectly, towards it. Its contributors don’t form a self-conscious collectivity or agree on any shared project or school of writing. Although there are loose clumps of persuasion within the book, the allegiances here are given as much by the criss-crossings of small-press publishing and editing as by aesthetic or programmatic loyalties. Or the two get indistinguishably superimposed.