Alison Mark is Research Fellow and Lecturer in English at Brunel University College . Deryn Rees-Jones is Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Liverpool Hope University College.

'This rich collection will become an important resource for a wide range of readers interested in contemporary women's poetry from the UK and Ireland. Alison Mark and Deryn Rees-Jones have managed to bring together poets working from within highly disparate formal, philosophical, and cultural traditions without engineering false unities; as a result, this book sets readers to [c]harting ambiguity, / tending the possibilities in language, as Maggie O'Sullivan puts it in the first section of poets' meditations on the act of writing. It also encourages readers to place its series of fine critical arguments about the seemingly irreconcilable imperatives of contemporary theory and feminist discourse in new angles of proximity to one another, to test their limits and make new intersections while engaged in closely reading the poetry. It presses me into dialogue; I'm grateful for its very valuable promptings and provocations.' - Romana Huk, Associate Professor of English, University of New Hampshire and Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Centre for Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Oxford Brookes

• Titles for Abbreviation Introduction Defending the Freedom of the Poet/Music Under the Skin; A.Stevenson The How and the Why; R.Padel Home Fires; S.Wicks The Poet's Dilemma: A Murder Mystery; G.Lewis God's Velvet Cushions; S.Hill Hospitalspeak: The Neuro-psychiatric Unit; U.A.Fanthorpe The Least International Shop in the World; M.Alvi Confounding Geography; J.Shapcott Riverrunning (Realisations); M.O'Sullivan 'Nothing that is not There and the Nothing that is'; D.Rees-Jones Writing about Writing about Writing (about Writing); A.Mark Poetic Licence; H.Carr 'Nothing to do with Eternity'? Adrienne Rich, Feminism and Poetry; J.Montefiore Marking Time: Fanny Howe's Poetics of Transcendence; C.Wills 'Body and Soul': the Power of Sharon Olds; V.Feaver 'Beyond Interpellation? Affect, Embodiment and the Poetics of Denise Riley; C.Watts Personal Politics in the Poetry of Carol Rumens and Denise Levertov; M.Lomax 'The Stain of Absolute Possession': The Postcolonial in the Work of Eavan Boland; R.Atfield 'Now I am Alien ': Immigration and the Discourse of Nation in the Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy; L.Kinnahan 'Curious Rarities'? The Work of Kathleen James and Jackie Kay; J.Winning 'A she even Smaller than Me': Gender Dreams of the Contemporary Avant-Garde; H.Tarlo Index