So Here We Are

A few years ago David Caddy set out to produce a monthly series of talks on poetry for miPOradio (these also appeared as a blog). He wanted to approach the important issues in contemporary British poetry in a conversational mode similar to that of Alistair Cooke’s Letters From America. Shearsman have now published these as So Here We Are. Caddy is the editor of the long running little magazine Tears In The Fence. He is based in Dorset and writes these illuminating talks from a particular and local perspective. Among others discussed in this very readable book are Raleigh, William Barnes, Blake, Bunting, Bill Griffiths, Allen Fisher, Thomas A Clark, Prynne, John Kinsella and many others. Subjects also include the long disparaged writing of the 1940s (and the importance of Sonia Orwell as a facilitator during this period) and the ‘poetry wars’ of the 1970s. It would be a handy primer for those needing a wider perspective on current writing here in the UK, answering as it does some of the questions weightier tomes on poetic theory might gloss over.