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.

This collection of original essays focuses on new and continuing movements in British Poetry. It offers a wide ranging look at feminist, working class, and other poets of diverse cultural backgrounds.

The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry offers thirty-eight chapters of ground breaking research that form a collaborative guide to the many groupings and movements, the locations and styles, as well as concerns (aesthetic, political, cultural and ethical) that have helped shape contemporary poetry in Britain and Ireland. The book's introduction offers an anthropological participant-observer approach to its variously conflicted subjects, while exploring the limits and openness of the contemporary as a shifting and never wholly knowable category. The five ensuing sections explore: a history of the period's poetic movements; its engagement with form, technique, and the other arts; its association with particular locations and places; its connection with, and difference from, poetry in other parts of the world; and its circling around such ethical issues as whether poetry can perform actions in the world, can atone, redress, or repair, and how its significance is inseparable from acts of evaluation in both poets and readers. Though the book is not structured to feature chapters on authors thought to be canonical, on the principle that contemporary writers are by definition not yet canonical, the volume contains commentary on many prominent poets, as well as finding space for its contributors' enthusiasms for numerous less familiar figures. It has been organized to be read from cover to cover as an ever deepening exploration of a complex field, to be read in one or more of its five thematically structured sections, or indeed to be read by picking out single chapters or discussions of poets that particularly interest its individual readers.

A comprehensive and scholarly review of contemporary British and Irish Poetry With contributions from noted scholars in the field, A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015 offers a collection of writings from a diverse group of experts. They explore the richness of individual poets, genres, forms, techniques, traditions, concerns, and institutions that comprise these two distinct but interrelated national poetries. Part of the acclaimed Blackwell Companion to Literature and Culture series, this book contains a comprehensive survey of the most important contemporary Irish and British poetry. The contributors provide new perspectives and positions on the topic. This important book: Explores the institutions, histories, and receptions of contemporary Irish and British poetry Contains contributions from leading scholars of British and Irish poetry Includes an analysis of the most prominent Irish and British poets Puts contemporary Irish and British poetry in context Written for students and academics of contemporary poetry, A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015 offers a comprehensive review of contemporary poetry from a wide range of diverse contributors.

This Companion brings together sixteen essays that explore the full diversity of British poetry since the Second World War. Focusing on famous and neglected names alike, from Dylan Thomas to John Agard, leading scholars provide readers with insight into the ongoing importance and profundity of post-war poetry.

This volume shows how British literature recorded contemporaneous historical change. It traces the emergence and evolution of literary trends from 1980-2000.

During the last decades of the twentieth century it has become increasingly difficult to consider British literature as 'national' or 'mainstream'. The book investigates contemporary fiction and poetry written in, or relating to, Britain and uncovers a distinct sense of a new and different national and social reality. Tracing literary effects of migration, globalization, and regionalization the book focuses on literary tradition as an inspiration or object of hate and frustration for the exploration and expression of post-Imperial experiences.

This book provides an overview of poetry from England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland from the postwar period through to the twenty-first century.

City Visions: The Work of Iain Sinclair collects fourteen pathbreaking essays treating the panoramic oeuvre of novelist, poet, filmmaker and essayist Iain Sinclair. This book aims to reflect and develop the current strong interest in the work of Sinclair, who is widely recognized as one of the most significant figures in contemporary British literature and culture. The essays herein cover the key genres and periods of Sinclair’s output, discussing his poetry, prose and filmmaking, and are developed from the proceedings of the first academic conference on Sinclair, which was held at the University of Greenwich in 2004. Following the introductory chapter, which includes a brief survey of Sinclair’s career up until now, the collection is arranged thematically in four sections. The first part, ‘Contexts’, features essays which comment on the critical categorization and definition of Sinclair’s work. The second part, ‘Culture and Critique’, includes essays which explore the political import and contexts of Sinclair’s oeuvre. The articles in the third part, ‘Connections’, look at the links between Sinclair and other writers, addressing the often noted intertextuality of his writing; and the final section, ‘Spaces’, contains three considerations of Sinclair’s treatment of London’s urban spaces. This collection provides access to the latest research by the leading scholars working in this area, and will be a key point of reference for anyone interested in Sinclair’s production. “To some, the field of `London writing’ may increasingly look like an indifferent, over-populated wasteland. Iain Sinclair, however, remains pre-eminent, by virtue, not only of the amplitude of his knowledge of the city, but of the intensity and complexity of his thought about it. He is the redemptive memorialist of a host of disregarded London cultures that lie quite beyond the reach of contemporary pieties. In that respect, he is less our Blake, as he sometimes seems to believe, than our Pepys or our Defoe. At the same time, he is an audacious experimenter with prose forms in the modernist tradition from Joyce to Burroughs and beyond. Like the Sinclair phenomenon itself, this valuable collection of essays is multifaceted, illuminating its subject from a variety of different angles, whilst very well aware that it is part of a `work in progress’. It offers important testimony to the scope and power of a writer engaged in an original, serious and necessary project.” —Andrew Gibson, Research Professor of Modern Literature and Theory, Royal Holloway, University of London “This is an important and timely collection about arguably the most significant living London writer who is increasingly being recognised as an important contemporary English author in every sense.” —Lawrence Phillips, Principal Lecturer in English, University of Northampton “At last, Iain Sinclair has the readers he deserves--at least on the ample, often provocative, and always fascinating evidence of City Visions, a collection of essays marked equally by panache and verve, awareness of alternative cultural history and theoretical sophistication. Over fourteen chapters, critics with wide-ranging interests gather their restless energies and obsessions in response to the scatter-gun agitprop and guerilla-intellectualism of Sinclair, to produce a necessary and necessarily edgy volume. In this admirably relentless collection Jenny Bavidge and Robert Bond offer an unnerving and inventive critical topography that uncovers the dark heart of a writer who is simultaneously the enfant terrible and éminence grise of English letters. Belles-lettrists and other dilettantes be warned, this is not a volume for the faint-hearted—these essays manifest an evangelical zeal equal to their subject's own; in doing so, they take us on an exhilarating intellectual adventure, so refreshing in the world of lit-crit, where the polite formulas of sensible reading make one want to faint from ennui.” —Professor Julian Wolfreys, Loughborough University

Discussing the work of more than 60 poets from the US, UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and the Caribbean, Nerys Williams guides students through the key ideas and movements in the study of poetry today.