Keith Tuma – författare

This is an investigation of modern British poetry and the ""death"" of that poetry in American critical circles. This text 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 rhetoric's of national identity on both sides of the Atlantic in the persistence of these views. Devoting its most extensive commentary to an eclectic collection of British modernist and postmodernist poets including Joseph Gordon Macleod, Basil Bunting, Mina Loy, Roy Fisher, and Peter Riley, the book attacks the relegation of British poetry to the zones of the quaint and antiquarian, making a compelling case for renewed engagements with fields of British poetry deserving attention they have not received.

A book of and about literary anecdotes, On Leave presents passing observations concerning the anecdote in a modular prose that tracks the events of a year on leave. Its cast of characters includes avant-garde poets, students, friends, family, and strangers encountered on travels in a year away from university work. Fragments of conversation with Bernadette Mayer, Tom Raworth, Trevor Joyce, John Wilkinson, Harryette Mullen, and many others lead onto informal commentary about poems by these authors and other observations about the reading and culture of poetry, all offered in the form of daybook notation.