"New British Poetry", Don Paterson and Charles Simic (eds), Graywolf, 2004

It's taken me over 20 years to catch up with this. It was written to show Americans what British poetry is like. Here are extracts from the front matter -

From the Preface by Simic -

• Until thirty years ago, one could still find ample selections of British poetry in North American school books. ... What [my professors] liked about the British was their reluctance to innovate ... Reacting to such views, the poets of my generation, and I imagine other readers of poetry, began to ignore what went on in Britain ... The rediscovery of British poetry on this continent in the last few years has a lot to do with the popularity of Irish poetry ... If the Irish poets were so good, one thought, then what about poets in the British Isles?
• It was contemporary North American poetry that I now found wanting ... formulaic. The favourite kind of poem was a first-person, realistic narrative that told of some momentous or perfectly trivial experience ... The chief strategy of these poems was to conceal that they were poems by avoiding anything that seemed too imaginative or too irreverent
• Americans prefer to dwell on the future rather than the past. We are wary of traditions, closed intellectual systems, and ideas that do not come from experience

From the Introduction by Paterson -

• Modernism fed into British poetry as a new, invigorating tributary to the river of the old tradition. In the main ... it did not present itself as the revolutionary alternative it was for the US
• There is still a powerful sense in the UK that, despite having lost much of its core readership, poetry can and should matter
• the self-absorbed, closed-system expressionism of the Po-mos mark them out as some kind of final Romantic. In the end, they probably do deserve to inherit the earth, being the first literary movement to have conceived the masterstroke of eliminating the reader entirely
• the Mainstream insist on a talented minority, and a democracy of readership; the Postmoderns on an elite readership, and a democracy of talent

36 poets each get 5 pages or so. I'm looking forward to reading the best of what Britain could offer then.