Synopses & Reviews
Keith Tuma's Fishing by Obstinate Isles explores the complex relations of recent British and American poetries, challenging reductive American views of a British poetry dominated by anti-modernism while discussing the role of rhetorics of national identity on both sides of the Atlantic in the persistence of these views.
Neither a full history nor a map of modern and contemporary British poetry, Fishing by Obstinate Isles is rather a series of essayistic interventions. By examining ideas of an America in England and an England in America, and in pursuit of a transatlantic perspective that respects local and national differences while avoiding parochialism, Tuma investigates several pivotal moments in the history of the British-American interface in poetry: the prewar movement in the early 1930s and American enthusiasm for a British modernist poetry following in the wake of Pound and Eliot; the New Poets of England and America in the 1950s, when the continuities between the poetries of the two nations seemed considerable; and the late 1970s, when much of British poetry was thought to be either inscrutable or irrelevant to Americans.
Devoting its most extensive commentary to an eclectic collection of British modernist and postmodernist poets, including Joseph Gordon Macleod, Basil Bunting, Mina Loy, Roy Fisher, and Peter Riley, Fishing by Obstinate Isles attacks the relegation of British poetry to the zones of the quaint and antiquarian, making a compelling case for renewed engagements.
Review
"One hopes that this book heralds and signals both more and less polemicism: fewer attacks on spurious straw figures and the passing of judgment based on prejudice, but more explanation, analysis, and reading of the poets and poetry on their own terms." --
Contemporary LiteratureSynopsis
Fishing by Obstinate Isles explores the relations of recent British and American poetries, challenging American views of a British poetry dominated by antimodernism while discussing the role of rhetorics of national identity on both sides of the Atlantic in the persistence of these views. Devoting its most extensive commentary to a collection of British modernist and postmodernist poets, it attacks the relegation of British poetry to the zones of the quaint, making a compelling case for renewed engagements with fields of British poetry deserving of attention.
About the Author
Keith Tuma is an associate professor in the Department of English at Miami University in Ohio. He is the author of Mina Loy: Woman and Poet.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Reading Modern and Postmodern British Poetry
Part One: Histories
1. Anglo-American Relations in Poetry, 1960-1995
2. England in America, America in England: Rereading New Poets
3. Uncovering, Recovering British Modernisms in Poetry
Part Two: Readings
4. Mina Loy's "Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose"
5. Briggflatts, Melancholy, Northumbria
6. Alternative British Poetries
7. Edward Kamau Brathwaite's X/Self and Black British Poetry
Notes
Works Cited
Index