Abstract
Book reviews of the following academic titles: -The Meaning of Form in Contemporary Innovative Poetry by Robert Sheppard (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Review by Gareth Farmer. -Poetry and Performance During the British Poetry Revival 1960–1980: Event and Effect by Juha Virtanen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Review by Sally-Shakti Willow.
Highlights
Digital Preservation: The Open Library of Humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the CLOCKSS scholarly archive service
The Meaning of Form in Contemporary Innovative Poetry is guided by Robert Sheppard’s opening conjecture that, ‘Poetry is the investigation of complex contemporary realities through the means of form’ (p. 1). ‘[I]f poetry does anything’, Sheppard continues, ‘it does it through its formal power and less through its content’ as ‘form is a modality of meaning in its own right’ (p. 1)
Sheppard has a long history as both a commentator on, and producer of, ‘innovative’ or ‘formally investigative’ (p. 1) poetry, and has been a champion of non-mainstream poetry against what he calls in his 2005 study, The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and its Discontents, 1950–2000, the ‘Movement Orthodoxy’, which continues the anti-modernist line taken by Larkin et al from the 1950s onwards.[1]
Summary
Digital Preservation: The Open Library of Humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the CLOCKSS scholarly archive service. These bold opening salvos inaugurate a detailed study of the formal practices of a wide range of contemporary poets, drawing on a number of key twentieth-century critical statements about the meaning-carrying nature and socio-political implications of aesthetic form.
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