Introduction

Abstract

This book explores the impact of ideas of space and spatialization on recent and contemporary poetry and demonstrates the way some poetry, through form and content, engages with some of the most pressing and urgent social and cultural issues. These issues include, but are not limited to, relationships between political, social and cultural structures, between people, language, identity and places, epistemological issues relating to language and ‘reality’ and to the impact of a global economy and environment on everyday lives. Much of the poetry I discovered that tried to deal with these issues is difficult. It does not give you easy answers or solutions, but specifically and implicitly through form and content critiques a culture or cultural products that present themselves as finished. If a shrink-wrapped commodity conceals its materials and processes of production behind a shiny surface, then all too often these poems have their constituent parts on display, telling us how they’re put together. They can seem to have too little ‘meaning’, if meaning is what we take away from a poem, or too much. Some of this poetry has been described as elitist, or intellectual, or academic, or as too interested in theory. What I discovered, to the contrary, were socially concerned poets trying to deal with the complexities of a post-modern world, unwilling to reduce experience to the neatly turned lyric.