Peter Riley: Modern French pastoral poets ‘represent a turning away from the unsettled atmosphere of Paris and in their lives and work there is a sense of creating a space aside from a lot of the harsher and more public events in the world, of being free to pursue personal and landscape meditations in peace. This is not to say that the poetry is placid or complacent, but the violence and anguish it reaches come from within, or if from the world indirectly, mediated by immediate individual perception, and the vocabulary rarely extends far beyond landscape, art, and general ponderings.’

Peter Riley: ‘It is hardly necessary to know when faced with Veronica Forrest-Thompson’s poetry what her theory is; it is enough to know that there is a thesis which to a greater or lesser extent determines the course of the poem and that the poems were conceived in accordance with the thesis and in some cases as a demonstration of it. Faced with the strangely contorted saying of her poems it is either a comfort or an irritation to know that there is a reason for it, even if you don’t know what the reason is. But it is also a relief to find that at least sometimes the poem gathers its own strength together to the extent that all thought of a thesis is dismissed.’

Peter Riley: ‘Being influenced responsibly by Prynne means at least two things, and the principal one is that you are made to think seriously and critically about the cultural condition you inhabit, which you probably reject as entirely corrupt and derelict. [Anthony] Mellors sometimes takes on even the lesser details of the polemic, such as the idea that to seek to get anything at a bargain price is reprehensible, which has always baffled me, perhaps because I do it all the time. ‘

Peter Riley: ‘Could there not be a modern poetry which is as complex and difficult as you like, and as fiercely and specifically directed towards the world’s ills, while inciting emotions of consolation, exhilaration, pride, and so forth, positive emotions, rather than being restricted to pricking the reader with the sharp points of homiletic contradictions? Well indeed there are such, and some of them are in this anthology, among a great deal of studious and sophisticated writing unable to escape from an oppositional despair – a great deal, in fact, of puritanical writing.’