Arcadian Rustbelt PRE-ORDER
Published July 2025. Available for pre-order.
This anthology is designed to answer a specific question: was there a second generation of alternative poetry in Britain, after the high tide of the Seventies? The inescapable context is poets reacting to Thatcherism. Much of the country was turning into rustbelt. But the enforced leisure could create space in which new art could be made. The design involves a series of anthologies of the Alternative world, within which this volume records a rigorously and specifically defined chronological section. We recover 28 poets from a period (1980 to 1994) in which the Underground had gone into a winter metabolism, while virtually anything that made poetry more innovative and expressive would lead it off the accepted paths and get it excluded from the High Street outlets. This is a moment of emergence into daylight. –the editors It's frankly astonishing how much work in the way of poetic thinking and poetic research with real political urgency and imaginative adroitness running through it was produced during this period. And this anthology does a genuinely eye-opening and ear-opening job in channelling it. "Rod Mengham This is a welcome back to a selection of writers who've been aside from mainstream, out of prominent view for a couple of decades and are rediscovered here. Voices feature transformations of rolling contexts which allow for free interpretation, shifting and obscured. The writing ranges across forms, subjects and references, living and the nether worlds, myth, and the human spirit. It is by turns visceral, mysterious, confusing and surreal. Somewhere, in the background, Prynne may lurk. "Tilla Brading
This anthology is designed to answer a specific question: was there a second generation of alternative poetry in Britain, after the high tide of the Seventies? The inescapable context is poets reacting to Thatcherism. Much of the country was turning into rustbelt. But the enforced leisure could create space in which new art could be made. The design involves a series of anthologies of the Alternative world, within which this volume records a rigorously and specifically defined chronological section. We recover 28 poets from a period (1980 to 1994) in which the Underground had gone into a winter metabolism, while virtually anything that made poetry more innovative and expressive would lead it off the accepted paths and get it excluded from the High Street outlets. This is a moment of emergence into daylight. –the editors It's frankly astonishing how much work in the way of poetic thinking and poetic research with real political urgency and imaginative adroitness running through it was produced during this period. And this anthology does a genuinely eye-opening and ear-opening job in channelling it. "Rod Mengham This is a welcome back to a selection of writers who've been aside from mainstream, out of prominent view for a couple of decades and are rediscovered here. Voices feature transformations of rolling contexts which allow for free interpretation, shifting and obscured. The writing ranges across forms, subjects and references, living and the nether worlds, myth, and the human spirit. It is by turns visceral, mysterious, confusing and surreal. Somewhere, in the background, Prynne may lurk. "Tilla Brading
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