Author Description

The Allotment is a diverse, international selection of new poets, ranging from Britain and Europe, to Canada, India and the Middle East. Each successfully achieves a vital synthesis and tension between two key elements in the lyric poem - Newness and Tradition. As with actual, hands-on allotments, where generations have cultivated something of and for themselves, the `plots' of these poems are spaces in which cultivation and growth figure strongly. And, as with other meanings of `allotment' - those of `measure' and `quota' - these poets can only represent a portion of the diversity of contemporary poetry. They are brought together not under the banner of a School, but rather (as Anne Stevenson has written elsewhere) as being `in thrall to nothing but poetry's weird tyranny and ungovernable need to exist.' In their ungovernability, these poets borrow from Romanticism as much as from Postmodernism, crossing boundaries between the traditional and the avant-garde. They are lyric poets, prose poets, performance poets, political poets, personal poets, spiritual poets, innovators, humorists, social-realists and yet more still. They are, in fact, quite simply very good poets well worth reading.