New Poetries displays the variety and vigour of eight young poets writing in English, from Britain and abroad. Most are in their twenties. They don't constitute a school or movement: their work attests to the independence of spirit of writers for whom the fashions of the 1980s hold little charm, whose roots are in the poetries of the past and of other lands. They are making a poetry at once individually oriented and open to growth.

The ebullient traditional wit of Sophie Hannah, the vivid landscape of Adam Schwartzman's poems set in South Africa, the formal challenge of Miles Champion with his debt to French poetry and to the New York school, and of James Keery with his different debt to the same antecedents, amply and originally repaid, are worth close attention. In Vona Groarke's and Justin Quinn's writing, two unusual and distinctive Irish voices sound. The precise elegiac note of Adam Johnson, who died of AIDS in 1992, is also generously represented.

Several of these poets' first collections will be published by Carcanet in coming years. The pleasure of this book is in its achieved variousness, the something more than promise that each of the writers displays.