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Peter Dent Feature - Introduction
The English poet Peter Dent published his first pamphlet in 1972, and has been a prolific writer since then. During the 1970s and 1980s, he ran Interim Press, which published a number of poetic and critical works, including two important books of essays on Lorine Niedecker and George Oppen. As his latest collections from Stride Books and Shearsman Books show, he is now producing some of his finest poetry. It is also some of his most abstract and condensed, placing serious demands on the reader. I hope this modest introduction will encourage more readers to engage with his work, and see it, in the context of his earlier output, as an investigation into the scope of poetic address and an examination of consciousness through language; as George Oppen put it, poetry as "a method of thought".
I would like to thank the contributors, and especially Yann Lovelock for his hard work in helping to prepare this feature.
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