Fishing by Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers

An investigation of modern British poetry and the
death
of that poetry in American critical circles. This text explores the complex relations of recent British and American poetries, challenging reductive American views of a British poetry dominated by anti-modernism while discussing the role of rhetoric’s of national identity on both sides of the Atlantic in the persistence of these views. Devoting its most extensive commentary to an eclectic collection of British modernist and postmodernist poets including Joseph Gordon Macleod, Basil Bunting, Mina Loy, Roy Fisher, and Peter Riley, the book attacks the relegation of British poetry to the zones of the quaint and antiquarian, making a compelling case for renewed engagements with fields of British poetry deserving attention they have not received.