This epoch-marking anthology presents a map of poetry from Britain and
Ireland which readers can follow. You will not get lost here as in other
anthologies - with their vast lists of poets summoned up to serve a
critic's argument or to illustrate a journalistic overview. Instead,
Edna Longley shows you the key poets of the century, and through
interlinking commentary points up the connections between them as well
as their relationship with the continuing poetic traditions of these
islands. Edna Longley draws the poetic line of the century not through
culture-defining groups but through the work of the most significant
poets of our time. Because her guiding principle is aesthetic precision,
the poems themselves answer to their circumstances. Readers will find
this book exciting and risk-taking not because her selections are
surprising but because of the intensity and critical rigour of her
focus, and because the poems themselves are so good. This is a vital
anthology because the selection is so pared down. Edna Longley has
omitted showy, noisy, ephemeral writers who drown out their
contemporaries but leave later or wiser readers unimpressed. Similarly
there is no place here for the poet as entertainer, cultural spokesman,
feminist mythmaker or political commentator. While anthologies survive,
the idea of poetic tradition survives. An anthology as rich as Edna
Longley's houses intricate conversations between poets and between
poems, between the living and the dead, between the present and the
future. It is a book which will enrich the reader's experience and
understanding of modern poetry. The anthology covers the work of 70
poets: Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, Edward Thomas, D.H. Lawrence, Siegfried
Sassoon, Edwin Muir, T.S. Eliot, Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg, Hugh
MacDiarmid, Wilfred Owen, Charles Hamilton Sorley, Robert Graves, Austin
Clarke, Basil Bunting, Stevie Smith, Patrick Kavanagh, Norman Cameron,
William Empson, W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, John Hewitt, Robert Garioch,
Norman MacCaig, R.S. Thomas, Henry Reed, Dylan Thomas, Alun Lewis, W.S.
Graham, Keith Douglas, Edwin Morgan, Philip Larkin, Ian Hamilton Finlay,
John Montague, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, Sylvia Plath, Fleur
Adcock, Tony Harrison, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon,
Douglas Dunn, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Paul Durcan, Tom Leonard, Carol
Rumens, Selima Hill, Ciaran Carson, James Fenton, Medbh McGuckian, Paul
Muldoon, Jo Shapcott, Ian Duhig, Carol Ann Duffy, Kathleen Jamie, Simon
Armitage and Don Paterson.
