The Penguin Book Of Contemporary British Poetry

There is unquestionably a new spirit in poetry today, argue the editors of this superb anthology. Charting the development of British poetry over the past few decades - expressed in a renewed interest in narrative, a preference for metaphor and post-modernist wit, and a reassertion of the primacy of imagination - this collection opens with Seamus Heaney and includes several more poets from Ireland, alongside Douglas Dunn, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Anne Stevenson and others. Together they represent a dynamic generation of poets.

Irish Poetry since 1950 is a survey of poetry, from Northern Ireland, the Republic, Britain, and the US, covering the 1950s, the 1960s, the early period of the Troubles up to 1976, the 1980s and the 1990s.

Peter Barry explores a range of poets who visit and celebrate the "mean streets" of the contemporary urban scene. Poets discussed include Ken Smith, Iain Sinclair, Roy Fisher, Edwin Morgan, Sean O'Brien, Ciaran Carson, Peter Reading, Matt Simpson, Douglas Houston, Deryn Rees-Jones, Denise Riley, Ken Edwards, Levi Tafari, Aidan Hun, and Robert Hampson writing on Hull, Liverpool, London, Birmingham, Belfast, Glasgow, and Dundee.

Bill Manhire takes the books and poems he loves out of the pupil and lecture hall and returns them to their readers. In these pages unlikely people rub shoulders - Ralph Hotere and Philip Larkin, Sylivia Plath and James K. Baxter, Maurice Gee and Laura Ranger - Then along the way Manhire investigates why the world's best poems sound like dirty songs, tell outrageous lies, and thrive on their own mistakes. These essays and interviews will not tell you what to think, but they will probably inspire you to do your own thinking.

An anthology of the work of 30 contemporary Irish poets beginning with poets of the 1950s generation. The selection includes poetry from the north of Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s.

From Tottel's Miscellany (1557) to the last twentieth-century Oxford Book of English Verse (1999), anthologies have been a prime institution for the preservation and mediation of poetry. The importance of anthologies for creating and re-creating the canon of English poetry, for introducing ‘new' programmes of poetry, as a record of changing poetic fashions, audience tastes and reading practices, or as a profitable literary commodity has often been asserted. Despite its impact, however, the poetry anthology in itself has attracted surprisingly little critical interest in Britain or elsewhere in the English-speaking world. This volume is the first publication to explore the largely unmapped field of poetry anthologies in Britain. Essays written from a wide range of perspectives in literary and cultural studies, and the point of view of poets, editors, publishers and cultural institutions, aim to do justice to the typological, functional and historical variety with which this form of publication has manifested itself - from early modern print culture to the postmodern age of the world wide web.