When Andrew Crozier says that the British poetry generally on offer "furnishes the pleasures of either a happy nostalgia or a frisson of daring and disgust", he says surely no more than the truth. If these are the pleasures that you look for in poetry (or in TV programmes for that matter, and upmarket newspapers), you know where to look - not very far. And you will know not to look in the bulky anthology that Crozier has edited with Tim Longville. The poetry that Crozier and Longville present has not been "generally on offer", and surprisingly has never tried to be. The 17 poets represented have published with Longville's Grosseteste Press or Crozier's Ferry Press, or with kindred shoestring enterprises like Ric Caddel's Pig Press - not because they couldn't break into the ring of the big metropolitan publishers, but because they chose not to try, distrusting the big houses' media-hype and show-casing of personalities. And yet they represent neither an 'underground' nor a 'counterculture' (those cherished notions of the 1960s, when most of them began publishing). Accordingly, their coming to terms with a mainstream publisher like Carcanet is, or ought to be, a notable event. As we might expect, however, Crozier and Longville are much more austere than most anthologists: no photographs here, no biographical information, not even dates of birth. At least two of their poets are dead, but there is no way to notice this except by noticing poems in memoriam one of them, John ...