Firstly, they trace developments,
often in the form of immediate reactions to newly published books, but
occasionally as surveys of whole bodies
of work, of what has been called the British Poetry Revival, the New British
Poetry or - more narrowly and
recently - Linguistically Innovative Poetry.
Secondly, they develop a series of
literary critical concerns, delineating the historical context and general
poetics of that work, a task that is continued, as yet in a piecemeal way, in
more orthodox critical settings.
Thirdly, several pieces explicitly
articulate what remains implicit in most of the rest: the gradual construction
of a specific poetics relating to my own practice as a poet which,
nevertheless, aims to be seen as part of the poetics and poetry from which it
developed.
The forms, lengths and tones of
these selections have sometimes been dictated by the demands or permissions of
their various original periodical publications (which I have indicated, along
with the date of composition, at the end of each piece), yet the resulting
variety lends a certain polyphony to the whole that avoids the monologic voice
of orthodox criticism. The slight mismatch between pieces I find additionally
more authentic to my experience of thinking these things through over the past
twenty years;
it was less linear - more speculative, provisional, positional - than the results
of this rigorous selection might suggest.
Apart from extended works of
literary criticism, and some bits of
language I'd rather forget, as well as shorter attempts that repeat assertions
made here, I have felt impelled to exclude a number of pieces I should like to
have made public again. My attacks (some of them satirical) on the Movement
Orthodoxy, carried out during my entryist period as a reviewer for the New Statesman, deflect from the
positive, even celebratory, aspect of this collection. My account of David
Miller, "A Gap at the Heart of Things", appears in another Stride
volume, At the Heart of Things. My
review of Paul Evans' The Manual for the
Perfect Organisation of Tourneys (Oasis Books), which I described - and
still regard - as one of the best British
poetry books of the 1970s, most recently re-appeared in The Empty Hill (Skylark Press).
Robert Sheppard
14 December 1997
Link to new 'Introduction' and links to all contents of the book here.
