Synopsis
The Poetry of Saying presents the history and social development of alternative forms of British poetry, still little examined or dismissed, set against the context of the development of the Movement Orthodoxy, those writers who followed and attenuated the tradition of Philip Larkin, even as Larkin’s cultural capital fell. Ranging from the quiet work of Lee Harwood to the avant-gardism of Bob Cobbing, from the major works of Roy Fisher to the still developing sonic and semantic experiments of Maggie O’Sullivan, and covering a number of other writers in their historical context, this work is theorised in terms of a poetry of saying, which aims to keep interpretations maximally open. This theoretical perspective, which is balanced against the historicising element, uses Bakhtin and Levinas as its touchstones, and reaches its highest pitch with relation to the work of Tom Raworth, which it argues is ethically open through its textual strategies.

Liverpool English Texts and Studies 45

224pp, 234 x 156mm, cased only

Published September 2005