This book reminds me why I began to read and write poems; I'm a little younger than the writers featured in this book but I remember the same excitement of hunting down small mimeographed and badly stapled magazines and pamphlets and going to raucous readings in the upstairs rooms of pubs on the edge of towns that were deemed to be far, far from the centre of things. This was in the distant pre-internet days, of course, and so a movement could be truly underground, could exist way off the radar of what the establishment told us was the acceptable face of poetry and art. The problem with being...