Recent theoretical debate has served to enhance our understanding of the plural bases of poetic modernism, and yet the construction of modernism as an international, urban and yet placeless, phenomenon remains, for the most part, a critical given. Peter Nicholls' Modernisms is one recent critical enterprise which has sought to overturn ‘the one-dimensional view of modernism’ which ‘is with us still’ as ‘a sort of monolithic ideological formation’. Accordingly, Modernisms, as the title of Nicholls' book suggests, proposes a survey of the diverse and often mutually antagonistic avant–gardes which jostle for space beneath the umbrella term of ‘modernism’. Nicholls' is a welcome and important intervention in studies of modernism, offering as it does a polysemous approach to its polysemous subject, and thus avoiding the limitations imposed by reading those poets we broadly classify as ‘modernist’ retrospectively, through the New Critical tenets which have canonised one strain of modernism (Eliot's), at the expense of other modernisms which do not prove so tractable to New Critical paradigms. (The importance of seeing modernism outside the New Critical paradigm is pressing, too, for those contemporary poets who view themselves as the inheritors of, in Charles Bernstein's words, ‘a set of radical modernist concerns that are still relevant to current poetic and political practice, just as they are still unacceptable to the official cultural apparatus’. Bernstein targets ‘literary canon makers from the New Critics to Helen Vendler’ as promoting a ‘type of gutted modernism’ over and above a range of avant–garde modernist approaches.)