Michael Schmidt & Helen Tookey 
New Poetries VI 
An Anthology

‘With this, the sixth New Poetries, ‘ write the editors, ‘the anthology series comes of age. It is twenty-one years since New Poetries I set the pattern, introducing new and relatively new writers, among them Sophie Hannah, Vona Groarke and Miles Champion, three poets so different that their art had to go into the plural.’ And there it has stayed: there is no common descriptor for the work of Sinéad Morrissey, Patrick Mc Guinness and Matthew Welton (II); Caroline Bird, David Morley, Togara Muzanenhamo and Jane Yeh (III); Kei Miller (IV); and Tara Bergin, Oli Hazzard, Katharine Kilalea and William Letford (V), among many others. New Poetries has never identified a school or a generation: the poets refuse to conform to any common cause, form or idiom, though they share a richly diversified language, English, and participate in traditions that are formally alive. To paraphrase the Scottish poet W. S. Graham, a tutelary spirit of the series, these poems provide moments of disturbance in the language. Poets featured in this volume: Nic Aubury, Vahni Capildeo, John Clegg, Joey Connolly, Brandon Courtney, Adam Crothers, Tom Docherty, Caoilinn Hughes, J. Kates, Eric Langley, Nyla Matuk Duncan Montgomery, André Naffis-Sahely, Ben Rogers, Lesley Saunders, Claudine Toutoungi, David Troupes, Molly Vogel, Rebecca Watts, Judith Willson, and Alex Wong.

About the author

Helen Tookey lives in Liverpool, where she teaches creative writing at Liverpool John Moores University. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Missel-Child, was published by Carcanet in 2014; her other publications include Anaïs Nin, Fictionality and Femininity (Oxford University Press) and, co-edited with Bryan Biggs, Malcolm Lowry: From the Mersey to the World (Liverpool University Press).