Modernism is, of course, not postmodernism

"If, as China Miéville has suggested, literature tends to oscillate between recognition and estrangement, then the British poetic mainstream groups around the former pole while seeking to cash cheques in the latter’s name. Beyond the Lyric is a perfect illustration of how successful poetry in this country stifles the challenge of what Sheppard terms the “linguistically innovative” with something that may be a cousin of Freudian “kettle logic”; according to this rubric, the avant-garde doesn’t really exist (its estrangement effects are just gibberish designed to fool the credulous) and the mainstream is where everything that’s truly experimental occurs anyway. Sampson separates her peers into finickety, portentously-named categories like “The Iambic Legislators” and “The Touchstone Lyricists” to create the illusion of edgy, internecine aesthetic struggle between these poets who devote so much time to puffing up each other’s work. Shapcott and Paterson are “Dandies,” wielding their “swagger-sticks” of linguistic brio against the “Plain Dealers” who succeeded the Movement and “Anecdotalists” like Jackie Kay and Paul Farley. What a rich, complex poetic ecology this country can lay claim to."

- from Joe Kennedy's review of Fiona Sampson, Beyond the Lyric: A Map of Contemporary British Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus, now)