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Though England has seen a spate of recent anthologies of alternative U.K. poetry, this collection marks the first published in the States in more than two decades. Caddel, a noted poet, and Quartermain, a prominent critic of postmodern poetry, collect a diverse and exciting range of work that is evenly balanced between such trends as Caribbean dub poetry; the mellifluous, baroque lyric as it has been developed in Cambridge; London-based performance and concrete poetry; and ""outsider"" figures such as Bill Griffiths (an independent Anglo-Saxon scholar) and Tom Raworth, whose Reverdy-inspired early lyrics first found appreciation in the States. The compelling introduction portrays a late-millennium English milieu that is marked by overlapping ethnicities and class perspectives, but that traces an experimental tradition ""back to Claire, Blake, Smart, and the two Vaughans, Henry and Thomas."" The selections from the 55 poets are brief yet excellent. Barry McSweeney, a self-styled Rimbaudian, is represented by a number of terse, direct poems that flaunt provocative language. Denise Riley's subtle, tradition-conscious ear allows lines that are unexpectedly comforting, while Raworth's ""That More Simple Natural Time Tone Distortion,"" a sonic joy-ride of one- to three-word lines that bristle with pixilated narrative, is a contrast to his traditional short lyric ""Out of a Sudden."" Tom Leonard's Glasgow Scots, not unlike John Agard's Guyanese-inflected idiom, brings to eye and ear a sweet, confident music that is unlike anything in this country. Veronica Forrest-Thomson, a poet and critic who died at 28; Chris Cheek; Maggie O'Sullivan and concrete poet Bob Cobbing are all well represented, as are important figures who guided the influx of New American poetry to the islands: Eric Mottram, Roy Fisher and Andrew Crozier. This is an important sourcebook to a literature that is probably more marked by the multiculturalist energy and divergences from the main modernist line than that of the United States. (Dec.)