Tess Somervell reviews The Salt Book of Younger Poets here. A well-researched and rather dry look at the crop of bright new things in Britain: There is not a poem among the three or four by each of the fifty poets in this anthology which is not in some way intelligent; dominant, however, is a specific type of intelligence, an intellectual self-indulgence of an almost metaphysical character. The grand abstract concept is less the order of the day than the local image stretched to its figurative limit, a brief moment teased out to fill a poem. Only the British could reinvent metaphysical self-indulgence for the twenty-first century.
And someone should review the second edition of Paul Hoover’s immensely useful Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology.
Two bright new books of poetry
One from each side of the Atlantic!
Tess Somervell reviews The Salt Book of Younger Poets here.
A well-researched and rather dry look at the crop of bright new things in Britain:
There is not a poem among the three or four by each of the fifty poets in this anthology which is not in some way intelligent; dominant, however, is a specific type of intelligence, an intellectual self-indulgence of an almost metaphysical character. The grand abstract concept is less the order of the day than the local image stretched to its figurative limit, a brief moment teased out to fill a poem.
Only the British could reinvent metaphysical self-indulgence for the twenty-first century.
And someone should review the second edition of Paul Hoover’s immensely useful Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology.