Breaking cover: Peter Riley's Passing Measures [1].

kc: ...what tradition is present in your writing?

PR: English poetry. All of it, good, bad and indifferent, popular and unpopular, overvalued and neglected, the lot. It's an entire climate, all the poetry being written at this time in this country.

KG: [Gasp!] [2]

There is no audience: there is one reader at a time comprising the potential of all readers, who has to be entirely trusted and honoured and is infinitely demanding. Which is to say that the poet is, actually, in love with the reader. There can be no qualification to that, except, of course, the reader's absence. [3]

Oxford University Press's outrageous decision to shed its poetry list in 1998 gives a misleading impression of the current state of poetry publication in the U.K. Indeed, this is an opportune time to attend to a loosely related group of poets who began writing in the U.K. during the mid-1960s and early 1970s, but whose work has not been easily obtainable until now. Michael Schmidt's Carcanet Press and Neil Astley's Bloodaxe Books, two of the most prolific poetry publishing houses in Britain, have begun to bring out single-author collections of writing which until the last few years had been side-lined by the larger publishers. In 1997 Bloodaxe published Barry MacSweeney's The Book of Demons, the poet's first "overground" publication since Hutchinson published his debut collection, The Boy from the Green Cabaret Tells of His Mother, as long ago as 1968. And in 1999 Bloodaxe in association with Folio and Fremantle Arts Centre Press published J. H. Prynne's monumental Poems, a corpus of writing which has various ly inspired, enthused, and (more usually) infuriated British readers and poets ever since 1968. Carcanet had begun to anthologise some of this "left-field" writing in the late 1980s, and in 1995 published Michael Haslam's A Whole Bauble, gathering an exemplary, individual career from 1977 to 1994. In 1996 Penguin Modern Poets brought out a concise selection of poems from Douglas Oliver, Denise Riley, and lain Sinclair--Sinclair had tried to promote the poetry of Doug Oliver and others through an ill-fated Paladin Poetry series in the early 1990s. And in 2000 Carcanet in association with "infernal methods" published R. F. Langley's Collected Poems, a life-work of just seventeen poems over 72 pages. This immediately garnered a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was also short-listed for the prestigious national Whitbread Poetry Award (won in the previous year by …