Within an austere, silver-grey cover evoking a corporate annual report or an Iron Curtain aesthetic, 487 poems from 169 poets are arranged in ten parts according to year, and in alphabetical order according to author within each part. Quadrant regulars such as Andrew Lansdown, Pascale Petit, Jamie Grant, Jennifer Compton, Geoff Page, and Hal G.P. Colebatch appear frequently throughout. After arguing that ‘academic class-defensiveness and preserving the year 1968 [have] become ever more of a turn-off for many readers’, Murray notes the ‘welcome refuge’ Quadrant has offered writers such as Colebatch (‘long sent to Coventry by the poetry wars of last century’), who ‘fight their corners in precise metre’. Stern formalism no longer monopolises Quadrant’s pages, but quatrains and rhyming couplets, as well as narrative verse, have markedly greater prominence than in anthologies featuring ‘Generation of ’68’ poetic progeny.

Many will welcome the accessibility of the poetry, including contributions from Judy Johnson, Craig Sherborne, and the late Gary Catalano, and brilliance from New Yorker Sharon Olds and British poet John Greening. Despite these inclusions, the anthology is far from the most diverse in its forms and themes, and when the over-represented Colebatch applies his metre to the nipples of women at a shooting range (‘Reactionary Observations at the Pistol Club’) it is always going to occupy a very particular niche, if not Coventry.