You are reading a book about experimental poetry written by women in Britain between 1970 and 2010. Such a book is long overdue because, in Britain, experimental women poets have struggled to get attention even from sympathetic critics. The important conference ‘Legacies of Modernism: The State of British Poetry Today’ (Paris, June 2011) featured uncomfortable debates about the critical invisibility of older experimental women poets. Similarly, Robert Sheppard's comprehensive survey of the British Poetry Revival and Linguistically Innovative Poetry, The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and Its Discontents 1950–2000 (2005) only discusses Maggie O'Sullivan at any length. Denise Riley's poetry gets about one page and other important figures are either discussed as critics (for example, Caroline Bergvall and Veronica Forrest-Thomson) or mentioned only in passing. Feminist critics have tended to focus on either Veronica Forrest-Thomson or Denise Riley because their poetry is an easy ‘fit’ with reading practices derived from poststructuralism and Second Wave Feminism. There is, then, a large body of women's experimental poetry in Britain that has never received its critical due and continues not to, with the result that it is forever in danger of being forgotten or overlooked. And, as Peter Middleton observed twenty years ago, ‘poems can only mean as much as the discourse where we give them attention’ (Hampson and Barry, 1993, 132).

We have chosen the designation ‘women's experimental poetry in Britain’, as opposed to ‘British women's experimental poetry’, because while the context of critical reception in which we locate our discussion may be more clearly identified as British, the production of the poetry discussed does not fit neatly within this category. We are keen to avoid the problems created within a wide range of poetry criticism where ‘British’ is treated as a neutral container when it is not. For example, Robert Sheppard's The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and Its Discontents 1950–2000 (2005) and Fiona Sampson's Beyond the Lyric: A Map of Contemporary British Poetry (2012) are very different books from each other. We are also keen to avoid any claims regarding inclusiveness and scope that our book cannot match because its interests are not in representing a multicultural and devolving ‘Britain’ but in poetry produced by writerly networks.