THE senior poet in A. Alvarez's The New Poetry (1962) is Norman MacCaig (born in 1910). 'The black cow is two native carriers/Bringing its belly home, slung from a pole'; 'And when it lands /Umbrella heron becomes walking-stick'; 'the cock/struts by-one can almost see/the tiny set of bagpipes/he's sure he's playing' . . . MacCaig's use of strained metaphor to 'defamiliarize' the commonplace is often effective. It is one element in a range of formal and tonal techniques. 'Basking Shark', one of his best-known poems, is in rhymed three-line stanzas, the lines basically five-stress, with an assured feeling for the stanza unit and for progression. Metaphorically inventive, the poem is also prosodically achieved. The vision of the shark makes the poet unfamiliar to himself: 'I count as gain/That once I met, on a sea tin-tacked with rain,/That roomsized monster with a matchbox brain.' The poem ends,

So,who's the monster? The thought made me grow pale
For twenty seconds while, sail after sail,
The tall fin slid away and then the tail.

He writes vividly, humorously, but would one dub him with that fashionable word 'ludic'?

In more selective ways, George Barker, R. S. Thomas ('the heart in its bone belfry hangs and is dumb') and Patrick Kavanagh-to name three poets of MacCaig's generation-have been resourceful in their use of verfremdung metaphor; and they too are accomplished prosodists, with access to the wide resources of English poetry. They insist on playing all the strings.

Now we are asked, in a book which sets out to displace Alvarez's anthology, to believe among other things that a new group of poets has uniquely 'isolated' and 're-emphasized' 'a time-honoured element in poetry'-metaphor, making the familiar unfamiliar (to ludic ends). This re-discovery and application of metaphor marks a 'decisive shift of sensibility'.

It is doubtful whether contemporary 'sensibility' is quite so unitary as Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion suggest in the introduction to Contemporary British Poetry (Penguin, £1.95). It must be said that of the 'Martian' and anecdotal ('narrative' they call it) poets whom the book champions, few approach MacCaig in terms of poetic resourcefulness and maturity. They have a slickness, a self-congratulatory facility, absent from his wry and unpretentious discoveries. Gentility is back not in the social and civil tone of the poetry- though self-effacement is pervasive-but in the way the players observe the rules. 'Ludic' is a word the editors use, the new-genteel poets play skilfully, and they play to win. Among the Martians, some play better than others. Craig Raine, who must have won more prizes than any other poet of his generation, and on whom the Martian school is fathered, plays best of all; his imitators less well. David Sweetman has written as if accidentally some good poems, but he appears to have no editor: his excesses (as in 'Coasting') are all avoidable. Christopher Reid is a dandy, fey and apparently unserious. The inclusion of Penelope Shuttle is incomprehensible except in terms of fashion. Mebdh MacGuckian hardly belongs, except in the excruciatingly bad poem 'The Hollywood Bed', among the Martians: her distinctive voice is much more complex than their game allows for. She has, among other things, an ear, rhythmic tact; and she has a first-person voice-the poems suggest a process not of distorted looking but of difficult engagement with experiences, ideas and things.

Why do Morrison and Motion make claims for these poets, and for the Ulster poets and the anecdotal poets, which they so clearly do not justify? It is in part that they are young, editors who want to be John the Baptists. More than this, they have chosen a very short period, much shorter than Alvarez's, and a strict geographical range. Also, they are examples of that relatively recent hybrid, the journalistic academic, keen to shape a canon for the sake of tidiness and a fashion for the sake of the market. Morrison has written well on the Movement, Motion on Edward Thomas: doctoral work, maybe, but well-translated into the vulgar tongue. There is not much evidence that either is inward with the work of Pound or Eliot, Bunting, Graham or Hill. When they write of 'post-modernism' their eyes are not upon the great Modernist writers but on recent (fashionable) French and American criticism.

What is profoundly contemporary about the anthology is the style of the introduction, the marriage of journalism and academic criticism, without the vigour of the one or the rigour of the other. The passive voice is preferred. There are two editors-one editor might have had strong views. Where Alvarez wrote with energy, warmth and a first-person intelligence (whatever we think of his book, it is stimulating), Morrison and Motion have adopted a committee English. What is more, though two editors are named, they efface themselves (as committee-men tend to do), invoking a wider authority than their individual or shared judgements. It is not 'what I believe' or 'what we believe' but 'what, over the last few years, a number of close observers have come to think of as the new British poetry'. Who are these observers? What authority do they possess beyond the authority of number? How did the editors canvass them? They claim that their poets 'extend the imaginative franchise'. Did they as editors extend the editorial franchise? Democracy is at work-evidence of the preoccupation with 'relativism' which, they say, is succeeding the 'empirical example' of the 1950s and 1960s poets epitomised by Larkin (how Larkin, decisively his own man, can be invoked as representative is hard to tell). It is refreshing to turn to Alvarez and read his first sentence: 'This is a personal anthology.' Back in 1962, the statement seemed a tautology.

Of the under-forties, Morrison and Motion declare: 'Free from the constraints of immediate post-war life, and notwithstanding the threats to their own culture, they have developed a degree of ludic and literary self-consciousness reminiscent of the modernists.' These poets 'show greater imaginative freedom and linguistic daring than the previous poetic generation'. Both statements are absurd, even if that previous generation is defined for them-as it seems to be-solely by Alvarez. It includes, inter alios, Larkin, Middleton, Davie, Tomlinson, Crichton-Smith, Gunn, Hughes and Hill. Only a very few of Motion's and Morrison's poets belong in that company by virtue of their intelligence, inventiveness and ear. The best poets in their book-Tony Harrison, Derek Mahon, James Fenton, Jeffrey Wainwright and Peter Scupham (who is ill-served by the selection)-fail to conform to the 'decisive shift of sensibility' that the editors are peddling.

The 'new spirit' was born, they say, in Ulster in 'the late 1960s and early 70s'. It has now crossed the water and dwells among us. The spirit is apostrophised and the editors seek to detain it by definitions, but the words they use are too general, effectively too romantic, to ensnare it: 'reassert the primacy of imagination in poetry' (imagination free of the trammels of recent history, untroubled even by the threats to its own culture); 'a potential source of tenderness and renewal' . . . These crumbs fallen from stale SDP speeches mean very little. Even if Alvarez's party had been in power, it would not have felt challenged or affronted by this, though it might have felt, just a little, that the poets' ability to be cheerfully ludic 'notwithstanding the threats to their own culture' suggested that the poets were unserious, or were-in their search for instant effects and in their playful externality-part of the threats themselves.

The particular literary criticism offered by the editors- especially of the work of Heaney, a king-pin in their enterprise- is not penetrating or very accurate. Alvarez has argued that Heaney is a sentimentalist. Motion and Morrison sentimentalize him, missing the occasional vigour of his irony, suggesting in his work a linear development which a close reading of the poems does not bear out. They give similar weight to two very bad long poems (one by Douglas Dunn, one by Paul Muldoon) and two fine ones (by James Fenton and Jeffrey Wainwright). The poems are different in kind, but to record such difference would be to admit untidiness, value judgement, contrast between anecdotage, narrative and meditation. The editors settle for length as the generic criterion in comparing them.

The sadness of anthologies such as this is that in their imprecise advocacy of the fashionable, they make no discoveries, no new connections. They exclude what their argument will not accommodate and they include even bad work that they take to support their stand, their vision of the shifting Geist. The book, widely disseminated, reasonably priced, becomes canonical in the market-place. Excellence is, as so often, marginalised. In this, too, the anthology is depressingly contemporary.