New poetries VI

'With this, the sixth New Poetries,' write the editors, 'the anthology series comes of age. It is twenty-one years since New Poetries I set the pattern, introducing new and relatively new writers, among them Sophie Hannah, Vona Groarke and Miles Champion, three poets so different that their art had to go into the plural.' And there it has stayed: there is no common descriptor for the work of Sinéad Morrissey, Patrick McGuinness and Matthew Welton (II); Caroline Bird, David Morley, Togara Muzanenhamo and Jane Yeh (III); Kei Miller (IV); and Tara Bergin, Oli Hazzard, Katharine Kilalea and William Letford (V), among many others. New Poetries has never identified a 'school' or a 'generation': the poets refuse to conform to any common cause, form or idiom, though they share a richly diversified language, English, and participate in traditions that are formally alive. To paraphrase the Scottish poet W. S. Graham, a tutelary spirit of the series, these poems provide 'moments of...