Andrew Crozier (1943-2008) was a poet, and an energiser of poetry. A champion of work excluded from the familiar canon, he brought to the English literary landscape of the 1960s and 70s an engagement with the energies of American poetry. As a publisher and critic he helped to create a space for new voices within English poetry: for George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Roy Fisher, J.H. Prynne. His own poetry is meticulous in its attention to language, exhilarating in its inventiveness and force. Crozier wrote that, for him, 'becoming a poet had to do with finding a mode for making sense of ...being alive', and his writing is alive with the possibilities of language. Ian Brinton, editor of The Use of English until 2011 and author of Contemporary Poetry since 1990, has brought together a comprehensive selection of Crozier's poetry and prose, much of it previously out of print or scattered in small press publications. Biographical and critical notes and a detailed bibliography complete this landmark edition of one of the essential figures in modern poetry.

This volume contains the remarkable PhD thesis submitted by Crozier in 1972, and for which his external examiner was J.H. Prynne-whose comments on the thesis are also included here, as an afterword. "My intention in writing this thesis has been to cast some light on the prima facie case that free verse, in abandoning the exercise of metre, has abandoned that principle of restraint upon which the creation of artistic form depends. This point of view contrasts with a general contention on the part of the exponents of free verse that their works possess form which is not only unique but which also bears an immediate relation to the significance of the work, a relationship felt to be 'musical', although not in any directly analogical sense."

Almost without exception the prose of Andrew Crozier, reviews and articles centred upon the close reading of poetry including fearless debate about the importance of some figures who have either been overlooked by the establishment or given little more than a cursory nod of acknowledgement, has been out of print for far too long. The work, often published in journals or as contributory chapters to other books, has never before been collected together and this seems astonishing. -from Ian Brinton's introduction to this volume.

This major international anthology provides students and the general reader with an invaluable introduction to contemporary modernist poetry. Containing over thirty poets from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and USA, this selection offers a powerful vision of late-Twentieth-century poetic achievement: international, politically- and socially-engaged, and radical in imaginative vision and practice. It celebrates risk, resistance, protest and diversity within poetry, reaching across national and cultural boundaries. Vanishing Points provides students of Creative Writing, Cultural Studies, English and American Studies, as well as the general reader, with an important survey of modernist poetry at the start of the new millennium. * A unique introduction to the wide range of modernist experiment in contemporary poetry * Ideal study aid for students of poetry and poetics * Broad, international selection of acclaimed modernist poets * Substantial contributions offer important insights into the range of each poet's work From the Introduction: The vanishing point lies beyond the horizon established by ruling conventions, it is where the imagination takes over from the understanding. Most anthologies of contemporary verse are filled with poems that do not cross that dividing-line, but our contention is that many poems in this volume are situated on the threshold of conventional sense-making. They go beyond the perspective of accepted canons of taste and judgement and ask questions about where they belong, and who they are meant for, often combining the pathos of estrangement with the irascibility of the refusenik. All anthologies enter the world fully aware of their genealogy, of where they fit in, of how they relate to certain traditions of writing by affiliation or rejection. This combination of dependent and independent gestures is inevitable, particularly in the case of selections of work aligned with national or regional versions of literary history. The present anthology does not fall into that category; its international reach does not, however, bring exemption from the dilemma of wanting to stand apart from conditions of rivalry while also needing to claim a special value in comparison with publications already available.