Preface ‘Suppose we made verses?’ said Pécuchet. ‘Yes, later. Let us occupy ourselves with prose first.’ Flaubert, Bouvard et Pécuchet With this, the sixth New Poetries, the anthology series comes of age. It is twenty-one years since New Poetries I set the pattern, introducing new and relatively new writers, among them Sophie Hannah, Vona Groarke and Miles Champion, three poets so different that their art had to go into the plural. And plural it has remained. Twenty-one years, and twenty-one poets in this volume: some will go on to publish a collection with Carcanet (indeed one or two already have). Earlier anthologies have disclosed remarkable poets: beyond those already mentioned, Sinéad Morrissey, Patrick McGuinness and Matthew Welton (II); Caroline Bird, David Morley, Togara Muzanenhamo and Jane Yeh (III); Kei Miller (IV); and Tara Bergin, Oli Hazzard, Katharine Kilalea and William Letford (V) among many others. More than half of the poets included in this book write rhymed and unrhymed sonnets. Shadow sonnets, ghost sonnets, sonnet shapes recur. Is this because as editors we are sonnet-haunted, sonnet-stalked? Or is there something about the sonnet form… we count thirty-three sonnets or near sonnets out of some 210 poems, and many longer and shorter poems reflect sonnet proportions, a 4/3 pattern. Sonnets ghost some of the prose poems. Were we to excavate backwards through the series we have a hunch that the sonnet has been a recurrent feature. As editors we do not have a particular sweet tooth for sonnets, but the poets whose work attracts us are concerned with form in ways that poets have experienced that concern for seven centuries, maintaining an oblique conversation with past and future and with one another, and all of them aspiring, if not to a place in heaven, at least to a share in Canto XXIV of the Purgatorio where Dante is welcomed as fulfilling and extending the promise of earlier poetries. There the dolce stil novo comes into being; here the reader can register how it renews and evolves. Jorge Luis Borges wrote a poem called ‘Un Poeta del Siglo XIII’ (‘A Poet of the Thirteenth Century’). This poet looks through the drafts of a