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Roddy Lumsden on Identity Parade

In 2007, an editor approached me about a possible anthology covering the younger generation of British poets. The project fell through but, having done preparatory work, I approached my own publisher Bloodaxe. Since they were already planning Voice Recognition, their anthology of unpublished younger poets, we decided to shift the emphasis and make it a generational anthology.

These books have appeared every decade or so, since at least the 1940s. An editor or team selects the poets they think best represent the current generation of poets, sometimes offering a broad sweep of styles, more often promoting the styles they favour, while apparently pretending the rest doesn't matter or even exist. The problem for me was the numbers game. Due to an emphasis on end-of-the-century lookback anthologies, such a book had not been done for close to two decades, so there were over a thousand poets to choose from. For that and the reason of breadth of styles, I decided to include a larger number of poets, around five for each year the book covered.

The next step was settling criteria. Would I include poets from the Republic of Ireland? Would I include other non-UK born poets, and if so, on what basis? Should I include poets who had died? Those who were eligible but had stopped writing poetry? Should I stick to poets with full collections? Since I had no co-editor, I decided to use 'consensus' to knock my choices against. Could I leave out an acclaimed poet because they weren't to my taste? Not without good reason.

So the reading process began and the list took shape. At least twenty names went down quickly - established poets such as Gwyneth Lewis and Paul Farley were going to be in there, as were favourite poets from the non-mainstream, such as Matthew Welton and Helen Macdonald. And here was my chance to promote some as-yet-undervalued poets such as Sally Read and Sasha Dugdale.

Having calculated how many poets were eligible - the number of debuts per year has risen from around 60 to 90 since the early 90s, though this is now dropping again - I realised I could not read every eligible slim volume (80 weeks full-time reading, I estimated!). Though I know my subject and read widely, there were bound to be blind spots, so I emailed a number of poets and editors, asking for those I may have overlooked. A number of poets found their way into the book this way.

The reading went by in two waves: first, reading books to decide whether to include the writer. Secondly, careful reading of work by the selected poets, to choose poems. The former process was made difficult by numbers - I was reading up to six collections per day (bravo to The Poetry Library), on and off but mostly on, for three months. Over 300 poets were seriously considered, though there is certainly a bell curve in the spectrum and many good mainstream lyric poets didn't emerge from the log jam.

Sometimes this 'hyper-reading' sent me a little snow-blind. At other points, I became very sensitive to poetic structure and how good poems work. I also began to concur with what I'd taken as a myth of the disaffected poet - that too much poetry is interchangeable, written in an over-familiar tone. I came to expect the overused imagery - the starling flock in particular, the word 'ash' used with a frisson, the hospital bed poem, snow as metaphor for the page.

The second wave also offered challenges. I solicited new material from the poets, which meant more reading. I picked what were the most accomplished and engaging poems - I didn't choose 'typical' or 'representative' poems or crowd-pleasers or topical poems though, as the book built up, I looked for texture and variation in form, style and subject.

Job done then. Alas, no. There was still the gathering to do. Poets sent me their poems and biographical information. The latter caused the next major task - putting 85 biog notes into a similar format and writing a brief comment on each poet, without unnecessary use of purple abstractions and adjectives. The last main job was to proof the book.

In all, it was a rewarding task, and if the book sells well, some of that reward may be financial. Regrets? A few: that the cut-off date excluded a few poets of this generation who published an early debut (Conor O'Callaghan, Elisabeth Bletsoe, Fiona Sampson); that there were so few poets from Asian backgrounds to choose from (the next generation will be richer); that my fellow Scots are under-represented and none of them under 40.

My ultimate aim was not to leave a record of this generation for history, but to create a sampler which would send people to buy individual books. I want to level the playing field at a time when marketing departments, the media and prize panels have tended to promote a small pool of poets. Yet there is a growing sense of pluralism fostered by individualism - this is a generation largely without movements - and this diversity is the main strength of Identity Parade.


Roddy Lumsden's own poetry collections include The Book of Love, a PBS Choice in 2000; Mischief Night: New & Selected Poems - a PBS Recommendation in 2004; and Third Wish Wasted (2009), all published by Bloodaxe. He is a freelance writer, editor and teacher. Born in St. Andrews, he lived in Edinburgh before moving to London.