In its place, however, we have two alternatives: exhaustive survey (beyond the scope of this short article, and besides of little practical use to non-initiate); or the invoking of that old shibboleth, ’critical consensus’ - this being messily triangulated from such various co-ordinates as book-sales, peer-approval ratings, literary prizes and awards, academic advocacy, journalistic championing and personal prejudice. This brief account takes the latter route, as being something like the middle way, and therefore the lesser of three evils.

The rise in the number of poetry books published in the eighties and early nineties and the dramatic growth of the ‘reading circuit’ in the UK and Ireland, was, as sceptics point out, a partly artificial phenomenon, boosted by several interested parties - publishers, journalists and various arts funding bodies who, for their different reasons, decided that poetry should be the Next Big Thing. However such a promotion could not have met with the success it did had there not been an unusually large and deep pool of talent on which it could draw. As the 90s have progressed, the natural weakening of that flow of talent has not, however, been immediately reflected in any tailing-off of publication. While a vast number of new poetry books are still published every year, the fact that poetry is conspicuously no longer “the new rock and roll” means that only a tiny number of those publications are now stocked by High Street booksellers; and these titles themselves often seem almost arbitrarily selected. The innocent reader will therefore have a nigh-impossible task in taking the pulse of contemporary British and Irish poetry from simply visiting a local bookstore, in the way they arguable could have ten years previously.

Mercifully, there are several good anthologies that cover the field, and can be recommended as reliable accounts of the contemporary scene: among them are Simon Armitage and Robert Crawford's The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945, Sean O'Brien's The Firebox – Poetry in Britain and Ireland after 1945, and Edna Longley’s Bloodaxe Book of 20th Century Poetry from Britain and Ireland; a highly useful account of post-war Postmodern and avant-garde practice is given in Ian Sinclair's Conductors of Chaos. (Less reliable is Keith Tuma’s aggressively postmodern-revisionist Oxford Anthology of Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry.)

What follows is not attempt to locate poets in their various stylistic groupings. The Postmoderns aside, the ‘schools’ - while often invoked - are too ill-defined, porous and fast-changing to be worth describing. Besides, contemporary poets are verbs and not nouns, and have the irritating habit of morphing into completely different poets in mid-career, making them irritatingly resistant to easy stylistic pigeonholing. This is merely a list of contemporary poets regarded, by the messy consensus described above, as among the more important practitioners of the art in the last thirty years, in the hope that it might be used as a starting-point for private reading or research.

In England the late Ted Hughes’ dominance of the older generation seems more and more - and this is no slur on Hughes - also a reflection of the relative paucity of talent it contained.  Only perhaps the mandarin Geoffrey Hill (who now seems to have reinvented himself, rather disconcertingly, as a sort of postmodern humourist), Charles Tomlinson and the expatriate Australian Peter Porter can be said to be poets of genuinely international importance. In the vague ‘generation’ below, however, we find several compelling voices in James Fenton, Christopher Reid, David Harsent, Hugo Williams, the late Ken Smith, Fleur Adock, U.A. Fanthorpe, Carol Rumens, Andrew Motion, Helen Dunmore, George Szirtes, David Constantine, Grace Nichols and the brilliant parodist Wendy Cope. Craig Raine was founder of the so called 'Martian' school - which may only have had one true adherent, but was nonetheless highly influential in forcing a generation to use their eyes as well as their ears. The most important poet of this generation, however, has been Tony Harrison; in particular, Harrison’s accounts of Northern working class experience were hugely influential in both the de-metropolisation of the English poetry readership (another major factor was the success of two major non-metropolitan publishing houses, Carcanet in Manchester and Bloodaxe in  Newcastle), and crucial in building the confidence of a younger generation of poets from the North who otherwise might well have felt themselves intimidated, like many before them, by the male/white/Oxbridge-educated cosa nostra who had dominated the mainstream of British poetry until the eighties.

In the younger-to-middle generation of English poets we find poets drawn from a far more representative range of class and cultural background, and see the gender-imbalance in published poets finally start to correct itself and approach something like equality. In this large group we might name Simon Armitage, Sean O'Brien, Jo Shapcott, Peter Didsbury, Gillian Allnutt, Pauline Stainer, Moniza Alvi, Mimi Khalvati, Maura Dooley, Glyn Maxwell, Ian Duhig, Fred D'Aguiar, Linton Kwesi Johnson, James Lasdun, Mark Ford, Lavinia Greenlaw, Jamie McKendrick, Sarah McGuire, Derwyn Rees Jones, David Dabydeen and the expatriate Americans Michael Donaghy, Eva Salzman and Anne Rouse.  Of the younger English generation the leading poets are Paul Farley and Alice Oswald, with Julia Copus, John Stammers and Jacob Polley among several highly attractive newer voices.


In Ireland, the scene has long been dominated by the remarkable constellation of poets that form the post-Kavanagh generation (the most notable survivors of which are Thomas Kinsella and John Montague). Many, especially those Ulster poets who emerged in the seventies, have gone on to acquire international reputations. The leading poets in this group are Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Medbh McGuckian, Tom Paulin and Ciaran Carson. In the Republic, major figures are Paul Durcan, Dennis O’Driscoll, Julia O’Callaghan and Paula Meehan; two fine Gaelic poets, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Eilean Ní Chuilleanain; and three English-based expatriates, Matthew Sweeney, Bernard O’Donoghue and Maurice Riordan.

While the Ulster group inevitably condemned the next generation of Irish poets to a certain anxiety of influence, nonetheless there are several highly attractive and original voices to be found here, among them  Vona Groarke, Conor O' Callaghan, David Wheatley, Justin Quinn, Catriona O’Reilly, John Hughes, John McAuliffe, Tom French and Colette Bryce. Interestingly, many are poet-critics, with Wheatley, Quinn and O'Reilly amongst the most energetic.