'Foil' is indeed out. I got a copy from Nic Johnson the day 
of publication as he came hawking goods to the Performance Writing 
graduation shows.

It's fat (395pp) and square (slightly larger than a CD). It's 
subtitled 'defining poetry 1985 -2000' and it's got a sepia 
heterotopic photo of a felt-hatted soldier pecking a blonde-bobbed 
and ringlett-haired belle on the cheek on its front cover. It might 
be a film still, but it isn't identified or credited. The whole thing 
is dedicated to Gael Turnbull and Roy Fisher and there's a PhD in 
that alone. Anyway the key impression of its design is highly 
romantic and that is born out through much of the selections inside.

There are some bizarre inclusions and exclusions, but as we've been 
discussing that's true of most anthologies. Nic goes out of way to 
try to position his selection (and I excerpt from a lengthy and 
rambling introduction):

'The anthology is usually a way of tidying things up, offering some 
last crumbs of the crust back to those that first baked it, to 
scavengers on the road who would gain sustenance by it. Foil 
represents changes in expectation of - and within - language; idioms 
up for grabs. A wide range of speech seized as birthright. Punned, 
sampled, or appropriated, serpentine and spatial, hysteric or 
vitriolic: this poetry pays keen attention to sound and has a driving 
pulse rhythm.

This folio offers a disparate gathering, before the chance is gone 
and the trail evaporates, of a not yet extinguished mass. A 
generation of writers, performers, activits, mavericks and showy 
presences - many not previously anthologized - drawn from small press 
publications and extensions of those networks. The parameters, 
post-'New British Poetry' (Paladin, 1988) were to locate a body of 
writing which barely grazed Iain Sinclair's 'Conductors of Chaos' 
(Picador, 1996). The 20th Century's last invisible generation.'

The book is marked by his own enterprises of the past 10 years as 
promoter of the Six Towns, touring organiser for MacSweeney and Dorn 
and many others. curation of The Andersen Festival and publisher of 
the Etruscan Readers and so forth. It is also marked by his own 
period of time on the Performance Writing degree course at 
Dartington. The more known (or elders) in this volume are arguably 
Caroline Bergvall, John Cayley, Aaron Williamson, (all three of whom 
are in orbit around Performance Writing) Drew Milne, Aidan Dun and 
Adrian Clarke. With those axes 'covered' he builds in younger 
emergences such as Helen MacDonald, Tim Atkins,  Khaled Hakim, Ira 
Lightman, Karlien van den Beukel, Tertia Longmire, Harriet Tarlo, 
Brigid McCleer. . .

But heck this elder-emergent stuff doesn't really hold up.  It's an 
interesting bunch of practitioners, most of whom are in their 30s, 
most of whom haven't been the subject of wide exposure. Some of the 
more arresting work here for me is by Tertia and Brigid and Karlien 
and Khaled and Harriet. Those with longer sections (20pp or more) 
include Williamson, Tarlo, Meg Bateman, Dun, McDonald, Longmire and 
Richard Makin if that's of any consequence. Johnson has an eclectic 
enthusiasm but his selections seem very much in orbit around rural 
romance with a bit of rough to spice it up. That rough might be 
achieved through spatial layout or non-standard englishes or dialect 
or the presence of syntactic noise. He likes a bit of typographic 
exploration in his pallette for example. He's open to more conceptual 
approaches. He has a fondness for things Gaelic and Celtic.

The inclusion of John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan struck me as 'odd', 
even opportunistic. Among the exclusions are Miles Champion, Alaric 
Sumner, Sarah Law, Keston Sutherland, Andrea Brady, Mike Higgins, 
Simon Perrill, Ulli Freer and Lawrence Upton (all of whom are 
under-anthologised) . . . it is difficult to see how the inclusion of 
Adrian Clarke does anything to help the bases of choice??? There will 
divergent takes around all of this. I have no particular axe to grind.

It's an attractive book, although we might get into a detailed 
discussion about the fit between its format and the work. That is for 
another time. One thing : it's incredibly reasonably priced at £6.95 
(bit steep dollar pound exchange at $19.95). Suggests he might be 
hoping to get his money back the US market.

love and love
cris
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