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New British Poetry: 1 London and Southeast England

© Dr J D Ballam

As the largest city in Europe, London has an arts community that is expansive, energetic and culturally diverse. Certainly London and its environs in southeast England are often perceived as the power-base of innovation in new British writing. Yet the editors of Poetry Now, one of the most prolific publishers of new talent in the UK, estimate that there are 1.5 million people across Britain actively writing poetry. Set this figure against the total of new collections of verse published by commercial presses-only seven between 1995-2001, according to Roddy Lumsden of Anvil Press-and this raises the important question, Where are new voices in British poetry being published?

One of the best places to sample the work of talented emerging poets is in ANVIL NEW POETS 3, edited by Roddy Lumsden and Hamish Ironside, and published by Anvil Press. As the title makes clear, this is a repeated experiment by one of London's foremost poetry presses, which seeks to foreground the work of authors who have not yet published a full collection of poems, but whose work has appeared, sometimes widely, in magazines and journals of merit. ANVIL NEW POETS 3 brings together the work of ten poets, 'from all over Britain and beyond', whose styles vary widely, but whose combined talents demonstrate the prevailing trends in British verse, as well as how those trends are interpreted by a top publisher like Anvil. My own favourite piece from the collection is 'On Reseeing Jules et Jim', by Robert Seatter, a poem that seeks to embody 'a gesture of sound, a something untranslatable.' Seatter's work has been published in numerous magazines, and he has won several prizes for his poems which, on top form as in 'First Marriage', can offer a rich blend of verbal grace ('Water/on our chests in a grey and green column'), or as in 'Water Tank', sudden contrasting shifts of mood or emphasis, so that it may be 'cool like a church in my parents' bedroom' but 'God gurgles in the cistern'.

While Anvil spotlights a representative group from poets who are, or who are likely to become 'professionals', Poetry Now brings an altogether different feel to its regionally-based anthologies such as POETRY NOW: LONDON AND THE HOME COUNTIES, edited by Heather Killingray. As one of the few really large publishers that actively encourages submissions, Poetry Now is able to draw upon a huge pool of resources to assemble an anthology where each poet is given one poem only to make her- or himself known. Almost necessarily, the result is a mixed bag, with styles ranging from the intensely formal to the avant-garde, but for anyone hoping to gauge how people in a given region-and there are anthologies for most of the UK's major regions-read and appreciate verse, these volumes can hardly be beaten. Sadly, copyright restrictions prevent me from quoting from individual poems, but it is worth emphasizing that with more than £10,000 available annually to winners of the various contests sponsored by Poetry Now, some real talent is on show here.

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