This major international anthology provides students and the general reader with an invaluable introduction to contemporary modernist poetry. Containing over thirty poets from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and USA, this selection offers a powerful vision of late-Twentieth-century poetic achievement: international, politically- and socially-engaged, and radical in imaginative vision and practice. It celebrates risk, resistance, protest and diversity within poetry, reaching across national and cultural boundaries. Vanishing Points provides students of Creative Writing, Cultural Studies, English and American Studies, as well as the general reader, with an important survey of modernist poetry at the start of the new millennium. A unique introduction to the wide range of modernist experiment in contemporary poetry Ideal study aid for students of poetry and poetics Broad, international selection of acclaimed modernist poets Substantial contributions offer important insights into the range of each poet's work From the Introduction: The vanishing point lies beyond the horizon established by ruling conventions, it is where the imagination takes over from the understanding.
Most anthologies of contemporary verse are filled with poems that do not cross that dividing-line, but our contention is that many poems in this volume are situated on the threshold of conventional sense-making. They go beyond the perspective of accepted canons of taste and judgement and ask questions about where they belong, and who they are meant for, often combining the pathos of estrangement with the irascibility of the refusenik. All anthologies enter the world fully aware of their genealogy, of where they fit in, of how they relate to certain traditions of writing by affiliation or rejection. This combination of dependent and independent gestures is inevitable, particularly in the case of selections of work aligned with national or regional versions of literary history. The present anthology does not fall into that category; its international reach does not, however, bring exemption from the dilemma of wanting to stand apart from conditions of rivalry while also needing to claim a special value in comparison with publications already available.
Author Biography:
Rod Mengham lives and works in Cambridge. He has written books on Henry Green, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and on language and cultural history; he has also edited books on violence and the artistic imagination, and on modernist and contemporary fiction. He is the editor of the Equipage series of poetry pamphlets and co-editor and co-translator of the anthology of contemporary Polish poetry, Altered State (Arc, 2003). His own poems have been published in Unsung: New and Selected Poems (Salt, 2001) and with photographs by Marc Atkins in Parleys and Skirmishes (Ars Cameralis, 2007). John Kinsella is the author of over twenty books, including The Silo (FACP, 1995), The Undertow: New & Selected Poems (Arc, 1996), The Hunt (Bloodaxe, 1998), Visitants (Bloodaxe, 1999), and Wheatlands (with Dorothy Hewett, FACP, 2000), The Hierarchy of Sheep (Bloodaxe/FACP, 2000/2001), and Auto (Salt, 2000). He is editor of the international literary journal Salt, a consultant editor of Westerly (CSAL, University of Western Australia), Cambridge correspondent for Overland (Melbourne, Australia), and international editor of the American journal The Kenyon Review. He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, Adjunct Professor to Edith Cowan University, Western Australia, and Professor of English at Kenyon College. Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems is due out with W.W. Norton in 2003.
