FROM THE PUBLISHER

Keith Tuma's Fishing by Obstinate Isles explores the complex relations of recent British and American poetries, challenging reductive American views of a British poetry dominated by anti-modernism while discussing the role of rhetorics of national identity on both sides of the Atlantic in the persistence of these views.

Neither a full history nor a map of modern and contemporary British poetry, Fishing by Obstinate Isles is rather a series of essayistic interventions. By examining ideas of "an America in England and an England in America", and in pursuit of a transatlantic perspective that respects local and national differences while avoiding parochialism, Tuma investigates several pivotal moments in the history of the British-American interface in poetry: the prewar movement in the early 1930s and American enthusiasm for a British modernist poetry following in the wake of Pound and Eliot; the New Poets of England and America in the 1950s, when the continuities between the poetries of the two nations seemed considerable; and the late 1970s, when much of British poetry was thought to be either inscrutable or irrelevant to Americans.