Jane Dawson & Alice Entwistle. A History of Twentieth-Century British Women’s Poetry

A gigantic task well executed, this is what Dowson and Entwistle’s book turns out to be. It takes the bull (or should it be the cow, the mad cow of Jo Shapcott’s amusing poems?) by the horns and tries to come up with a possible history of the many diverse and often uncollected female voices in Britain in the twentieth century. Dowson and Entwistle’s definition of “British Women’s Poetry” is flexible: “The following poets are British born, published in Britain and/or judged to have made a sign...