Border Blurs

Reviews / Votes

'This is an excellent, well-researched and up-to-date account of the development of concrete poetry in England and Scotland from the 1950s onwards. It will make an outstanding contribution to knowledge in the related fields of concrete poetry, late modernism, the history of the 1960s counter-culture and the British Poetry Revival.'
Dr Steve Willey, Birkbeck, University of London Reviews

'Greg
Thomas here gives us the first full treatment of English and Scottish concrete
poetry. His survey is detailed and
comprehensive, and he is especially acute in his treatment of both the interaction
of two distinct literary cultures - nationalism and internationalism - and the reciprocity
of literature and other media. He thus
argues that "classical concrete" was followed by another concrete "more
concerned with complicating or undermining linguistic sense, and with instating
in language's place various forms of multi-media communication and expression ...". A genuinely inventive and valuable
book for students and scholars of modernism, intermedia art, and British
literature.'

Dr Nancy Perloff, Curator, Modern & Contemporary Collections, Getty Research Institute 'Border Blurs is a welcome and long overdue study of what is a key component of the general turn of British poetry towards what we might loosely describe as modernism and experiment that began in the 1960s and continues to this day. Thomas writes well and clearly... and has done anyone interested in poetry in all its variety an enormous favour. I highly recommend this book.' Billy Mills, Elliptical Movements