“Over the past 40 years or so, British poets have been remaking the pastoral. It has been a violent business. What Raymond Williams once severely called the old “enamelled world” of pastoral poetry has been worked over, its certainties cracked and shattered. Long gone are those shepherds and shepherdesses idly enacting class hierarchies. Toxins have seeped into Arcadia; “nature” is a mess of our own manufacture. Out of the static conservatisms of an ancient form has come a series of countervailing modes: the anti-pastoral, the counter-pastoral, the radical pastoral, the post-pastoral.”

The Ground Aslant, a new Shearsman anthology edited by Other Room reader Harriet Tarlo and featuring Other Room readers Zoë Skoulding and Carol Watts, reviewed in The Guardian, here.