Agenda: An Anthology--The First Four Decades (1959-1993)

In 1959 Cookson, like James Laughlin of New Directions, was inspired by Ezra Pound to enter publishing. Forty years later Agenda , the magazine Cookson launched with Pound, has become one of the preeminent forums for British poetry and criticism. Here Cookson glances back over the years and selects the ``material that has stayed in my mind.'' Readers will be struck by how rich this material is: from Geoffrey Hill to T. S. Eliot, Thom Gunn to Ezra Pound. But perhaps more interesting is the strong selection of British poets who are relatively unknown to American audiences: Peter Dale, Michael Hamburger, Anne Beresford, to name a few. The editor has also gathered a formidable selection of essays on poets and poetry. Though most of the critical essays are fairly well known, the short essays of ``A Closing Miscellany'' are especially notable. In short, though the works collected here are not always timeless, they bear out Cookson's maxim that ``Poetry ought to be the most subtle and living form of language.'' (July)