Showing posts with label Amy De'Ath. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Amy De'Ath. Show all posts

Tuesday, 20 September 2011

Catching Up with Anthologies: The Best British Poetry 2011


NB: In all the "catching up" entries, I have work in the publication.


Salt Publishing and Roddy Lumsden have come up with a British parallel to the well established Best American Poetry Series overseen by David Lehman. The first editor is Lumsden himself, to be followed by Sasha Dugdale next year. While the initial volume is a largely mainstream selection (with, strangely, not a prose poem in sight), it possesses greater energy and range than the annual Forward Book of Poetry, as evidenced in poems by Gillian Allnutt, Amy De'Ath, and Chris McCabe, among others.

The advantage of a single poet reading through a year's magazines for selections, over the Forward's approach of taking four selections from each magazine editor, manifests in the larger selection of younger and emerging poets therein. It's good, too, to see in the represented magazines a mix of the usual suspects (Poetry Review and Poetry London, but not, interestingly, TLS or LRB) and such internet journals as Ink, Sweat and Tears and Shadowtrain and more experimental journals like QUID and Shearsman. Part of the success of the American series has come from annual editors' choices seemingly pushing beyond personal taste, in an attempt to recognise the best work whatever the style; that range in choice of editors and work selected will need to increase as the series goes on for it to distinguish itself from the Forward. Here's hoping!


Wednesday, 15 December 2010

Amy De'Ath's first pamphlet, Erec & Enide


Section VII of "Poetry for Boys":


Down dampen sully unknown

because you ate the sunshine,

asunder among the porch-light

a tune to know, of history’s mesh

an epistolary flash of deer

young, always in fashion, in brave

pursuit, climbing down a piece

of fruit to get to the last boy in

town, who ate the town and

whipped his jacket up to the

wind and ripened on a cloud,

a compensating cloud in glut, and

he fell down, he fell upon those

vandals, he was a feat of sunshine.





Amy De'Ath

Erec & Enide

Salt Publishing, 2010



Salt Publishing's page for Erec & Enide, with links for purchasing, can be found here.