Course of English Surrealist Poetry Since the 1930s

"Jackaman has written a full-scale book . . . which easily holds its own against a number of earlier studies which it complements and supplements . . . . Its particular strength lies in the enormous amount of significant detail it retrieves and discusses from sources not easy to come by outside of a few well-endowed research libraries: long out-of-print books from small presses, fly-by-night journals, and unpublished doctoral dissertations. . . . In recovering and arguing the case for a body of writing too often overlooked, he has produced a book which will be compulsory reading for anybody undertaking a reevaluation of English poetry from the 1930s to the present day." - K. K. Ruthven, in Scholarly Research and Review

". . . clear summaries of surrealist theory in the thirties, usefully outlining its growth in periodicals such as Experiment and Gascoyne's Short Survey, and the movement is shown developing from 'psychic automatism' to its more sophisticated form where the unselective subconscious is used metaphorically, not literally. . . . It is a valuable introduction to the thirties writers, and makes suggestive points about later material which may develop their use of catachresis and elision, aided by Jackaman's awareness of one origin of English surrealism in the equation between inner and outer reality found in Coleridge and other Romantics." - The Year's Work in English

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