"New British Poetry", Don Paterson and Charles Simic (eds), (Graywolf, 2004)

It's taken me over 20 years to catch up with this. It was written to show Americans what British poetry is like. Here are extracts from the front matter -

From the Preface by Simic - Until thirty years ago, one could still find ample selections of British poetry in North American school books. ... What [my professors] liked about the British was their reluctance to innovate ... Reacting to such views, the poets of my generation, and I imagine other readers of poetry, began to ignore what went on in Britain ... The rediscovery of British poetry on this continent in the last few years has a lot to do with the popularity of Irish poetry ... If the Irish poets were so good, one thought, then what about poets in the British Isles? ...
It was contemporary North American poetry that I now found wanting ... formulaic. The favourite kind of poem was a first-person, realistic narrative that told of some momentous or perfectly trivial experience ... The chief strategy of these poems was to conceal that they were poems by avoiding anything that seemed too imaginative or too irreverent ... Americans prefer to dwell on the future rather than the past. We are wary of traditions, closed intellectual systems, and ideas that do not come from experience

From the Introduction by Paterson -

• Modernism fed into British poetry as a new, invigorating tributary to the river of the old tradition. In the main ... it did not present itself as the revolutionary alternative it was for the US
• There is still a powerful sense in the UK that, despite having lost much of its core readership, poetry can and should matter
• the self-absorbed, closed-system expressionism of the Po-mos mark them out as some kind of final Romantic. In the end, they probably do deserve to inherit the earth, being the first literary movement to have conceived the masterstroke of eliminating the reader entirely
• the Mainstream insist on a talented minority, and a democracy of readership; the Postmoderns on an elite readership, and a democracy of talent

36 poets each get 5 pages or so. They're my age, more or less. I grew up with them. Some (Jo Shapcott?) have fallen away. Others (Armitage) have kept going. Any surprise inclusions? Not especially, even with the advantage of hindsight. Allnutt, Bhatt, Didsbury, Mark Ford, Glenday, McKendrick, Motion, Reading, and Anne Rouse are there.

Each poet has a few lines of blurby introduction -

• "Armitage is a poet of terrific rhetorical power and control"
• Bhatt's "translucent, weightless line cleverly disguises a rigorous technique"
• Burnside's "radiant meditations have been perhaps the most quietly and pervasively influential voice to have emerged in British poetry in the last twenty years"
• "In their flawless technique, [Donaghy's poems] seem, perhaps, built to last in a way few other poets in the language can currently rival"
• Selima "Hill has been one of the very few poets to have contributed something wholly original to the feminist debate in the last twenty years"
• Maxwell's "voice has developed into one of the most original of the last fifty years"
• "O'Brien is the UK's leading poet-critic"
• Oswald "often seems - against the grain of contemporary British practise - to wholly tell, and not show"
• "Reading is an impossible poet to represent fairly by extracts"

I liked "Scheherazade" (Allnutt), "Machines" (Donaghy), "Shibboleth" (Donaghy), "Prayer" (Carol Ann Duffy), "The Hill-track" (Kathleen Jamie), "April" (Alice Oswald), "Testament" (Anne Rouse), "Phrase book" (Jo Shapcott).

I was puzzled by "The sky my husband" (John Ash), "What the uneducated old woman told me" (Christopher Reid).

Other reviews

• James Rother (At first blush, it must be said, a skimming of New British Poetry’s innards proves not all that enticing. A majority of its inclusions seem, despite the occasional lurch into the memorable, to lack assuredness and in some cases even basic skills. ... two Americans and an Irishman attempted to put English poetry back into the mainstream of European culture. The effect of those generations who have succeeded to the heritage of Eliot, Pound, and Yeats has been to largely squander the awareness those three gave us of our place in world literature, and to retreat into a self-congratulatory parochialism. ... Simon Armitage, Christopher Reid, and Michael Hoffmann, all of whose unassuming and accomplished work stands head and shoulders above much of the whatever filling out the anthology’s body of text. Of their poems, the most outstanding are, respectively, “The Dead Sea Poems,” “Mermaids Explained,” and “Lament for Crassus.”)
• Todd Swift (The plain truth is, there is no poet currently writing (Edwin Morgan excepted and he is in his 80s) in England, Scotland, or Wales, with the gravitas, humanity, intelligence, or craft, of Heaney; nor one to better the cavalier verve of Muldoon; or learned elegance of Mahon, for that matter. ... It is unusual for anthologies to be fronted by so many pages of sheer nonsense ... There are perhaps twenty-five very good poems in the collection. There seems to have been a tendency to go for the ones that American readers will "get", and this means a lot of local flavour has been drained. Some of the best include: Armitage's "Poem"; Dongahy's "The Bacchae"; Carol Ann Duffy's "Warming Her Pearls"; The three from Fenton; Michael Hoffman's "Lament for Crassus"; Jenkins's "Visiting"; "Pentecost" from Lewis; Lumsden's "An Older Woman"; and the five from Motion.)
• John Drexel (American readers (and American poets) ought to discover, if they haven’t already, Mark Ford and Carol Ann Duffy and Michael Hoffmann.)