What a real delight to see collected together in this attractive format a major selection from the prose of the privately circulated poetry worksheet The English Intelligencer. Building upon an excellently run one-day conference last year at St. John’s College Cambridge the three organisers Neil Pattison, Reitha Pattison and Luke Roberts have compiled this break-through publication which has been published by Mountain Press (http://mountain-press.co.uk). As the blurb on the back puts it:
The English Intelligencer’s shifting cast of contributors included such major figures in modernist poetry as Andrew Crozier, John James, Barry MacSweeney, J.H. Prynne and Peter Riley.
The correspondence and essays published here for the first time represent the discourse of an extraordinary group of young poets struggling collectively and independently to articulate the terms of a radical poetics.
Tears in the Fence 