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New Poetries I

Edited by Michael Schmidt

New Poetries
Series: New Poetries
Categories: Anthologies
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
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  • Description
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  • New Poetries displays the variety and vigour of eight young poets writing in English, from Britain and abroad. Most are in their twenties. They don't constitute a school or movement: their work attests to the independence of spirit of writers for whom the fashions of the 1980s hold little charm, whose roots are in the poetries of the past and of other lands. They are making a poetry at once individually oriented and open to growth.

    The ebullient traditional wit of Sophie Hannah, the vivid landscape of Adam Schwartzman's poems set in South Africa, the formal challenge of Miles Champion with his debt to French poetry and to the New York school, and of James Keery with his different debt to the same antecedents, amply and originally repaid, are worth close attention. In Vona Groarke's and Justin Quinn's writing, two unusual and distinctive Irish voices sound. The precise elegiac note of Adam Johnson, who died of AIDS in 1992, is also generously represented.

    Several of these poets' first collections will be published by Carcanet in coming years. The pleasure of this book is in its achieved variousness, the something more than promise that each of the writers displays.
    Michael Schmidt FRSL, poet, scholar, critic and translator, was born in Mexico in 1947; he studied at Harvard and at Wadham College, Oxford, before settling in England. Among his many publications are several collections of poems and a novel, The Colonist (1981), about a boy’s childhood in Mexico. He is general ... read more
    Awards won by Michael Schmidt Winner, 2016 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem - Sasha Dugdale's 'Joy', published in PN Review 227  (PN Review 227 )
    Praise for Michael Schmidt 'Its pleasures are longer term ones: as you return to it and re-read its substantial selections, you come to appreciate how and what each contributor is working on.'

    Jane Routh, The North 66

    '...this is the joy of New Poetries VIII: time and again you discover refreshing and compelling new styles and subjects'

    Jake Morris-Campbell, The Poetry School

    '...probably the most informative and entertaining poetry journal in the English-speaking world.'
    John Ashbery
     'The most engaged, challenging and serious-minded of all the UK's poetry magazines.'
    Simon Armitage
    'It has attempted to take poetry out of the backwaters of intellectual life and to find in it again the crucial index of cultural health.'
    Cairns Craig, Times Literary Supplement
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