Border Lines: Contemporary Poems in English

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia and is the
co-editor of Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

Border Lines offers a wonderful smorgasbord of choices for anyone
interested in poetry from the English-speaking world. The word-hungry
reader can graze the selection at a self-determined pace and order,
while the more analytic can take advantage of the editors’
introductions to acquire an orientation. Victor Li, in his introduction
to the United Kingdom section, outlines its guiding principles: to avoid
the familiarity of established literary taste on the one hand, and the
aggressive promotion of certain schools or movements of poetry on the
other—and, through his selections, to introduce the reader to a number
of recent poetic developments in Britain. Replace “Britain” with
“English-speaking world” and you have the book summarized.

In addition to the United Kingdom, there are sections devoted to
Canada, Africa, the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand, and the United
States. One wonders why no space is given to India or to southeast Asia.
This book would be an ideal text for any postsecondary course on
contemporary poetry with a multicultural or multinational approach.