Here are arcane mysteries, here are forgotten histories; here are assorted arcana and incunabula; and here there is a transposition of a Chinese classic to contemporary Glasgow, filtered through the mesh of a Chinese martial-arts movie. And what connects aerial photography, growing up in the Turkic lands, and sound-poetry (the difficulties of)? Andrew Duncan's imagination, which ranges far and wide, but always brings back news of interesting climes, and lands where perhaps even the poets' heads do grow beneath their shoulders. 'Savage Survivals' is Andrew Duncan's eighth collection, and his...

Andrew Duncan's latest study of contemporary British poetry offers studies of some thirteen modern poets, together with a number of general essays giving an overview of events and trends in British poetry over the past thirty to forty years. Some of the names will surprise, others will be expected. The juxtapositions of ideas, and of names, will disturb those who are more comfortable with trench warfare than with dialogue, and Duncan's startling apercus will leave even the most well-read student of poetry wondering."

Where poetry is dominated by amateurs, its key ideas are the ones that nobody owns. Underneath the glittering cavalcade of conscious and innovative art is another world of poetry without technique, protected from change. Can we find a history of what seems to be most inaccessible to time? Can we write a history of the unheard voices, articulate the unconscious and write a stylistics of the conventional? Most people who write poetry are untouched by theory and have no expectations of winning prizes. Is there a much deeper, inarticulate, pulse of style history, almost detached from reflexivity...

"The first interview here with Allen Fisher dates from 1973. I took the decision to collect old interviews rather than make an all-new book. I am fascinated by the idea of a very long base line, records of one person's views over 30 years, change as part of the object recorded. Drawing on the creative input of Eric Mottram, Adrian Clarke, and Victoria Sheppard (among others) made the book more robust and embracing." (Andrew Duncan)

Threads of Iron is Duncan's lost debut volume: not because it was never published, but because it never appeared as intended. Instead, the original was split into two and was published in two parts by Reality Street (in 1991) and by Shearsman Books (in 2000). A further part of the manuscript was cut and became Sound Surface (see In Five Eyes, published simultaneously with this volume).

In Five Eyes recovers two almost-lost collections of poems-Sound Surface & Surveillance and Compliance-published some 20 and 10 years ago, respectively, but which were written in the 1980s and early 1990s. Published originally in fugitive editions, these two collections fill out the picture of Duncan's earlier work. Sound Surface was part of the original Threads of Iron manuscript, the remainder of which is published simultaneously with this volume

Why “silent rules”? Poetry is made of sound, in the form of speech, but is governed by rules which are not stated explicitly. As a help to readers, we try to tease out and make plain these silent rules. You have to perceive the structure of a work in order to read it. The subtitle is “inside and out” and becoming an insider involves knowing what the silent rules are. So much of the staging of modern poetry has operated a kind of “stereo blindness”, in which whatever is visible to observer A is invisible to observer B, and vice versa. Annulling territoriality and blocks on...

Thomas Kling (1957-2005) was born in Bingen am Rhein, near Frankfurt, grew up in Hilden, and went to school in Dusseldorf. He later lived in Vienna, Finland and Cologne, and finally settled down as a freelance writer near Neuss, living in a house on a decommissioned NATO missile station in Hombroich. As well as numerous collections of poems he also published translations of Catullus and was editor of the anthology Sprachspeicher. 200 Gedichte auf deutsch vom achten bis zum zwanzigsten Jahrhundert (Language Storage. 200 Poems in German from the 8th to the 20th Century, 2001). Thomas Kling died...