A counterblast to Blake Morrison from Matt Dalby:

“Not only are we not really here, it seems we were never here. I would have posted this sooner if I’d got round to reading the weekend Guardian before now. In a review on Saturday Blake Morrison reviewed Fiona Sampson’s A Century of Poetry Review.

Now given that things were fairly eventful round there in the 70’s you’d think there might be plenty of opportunity to mention the British Poetry Revival, Bob Cobbing and so on. Apparently not. The closest he comes are the following:

Controversy also surrounded Eric Mottram in the 1970s, with his radical Anglo-American poetics. Which comes as an aside in a discussion of Muriel Spark’s editorship, and

Several editors of the Poetry Review, including Mottram and later Peter Forbes, strenuously avoided little-Englandism, and there’s a reasonable showing of Americans and Europeans here, including Brodsky, Ginsberg, Ashbery and Primo Levi.

And that’s your lot. Maybe this is reflective of the contents of the book, I can’t find a list of contents and don’t propose buying a copy to find out.”

More Matt Dalby here.