Foil enacts a kind of negative definition because it collects a wide range of work which can't easily be described as mainstream or innovative even as it appears to lean in one direction or the other. It contains a lot of work which is generally excluded from both mainstream and innovative anthologies. What I mean by this is that Foil enacts a different kind of inclusiveness. Twelve of its thirty-three contributors are women. The non-white British writers in Foil , in contrast to Other , say, or The New Poetry , don't seem to be present only in the service of an argument that contemporary British poetry is a multicultural, rainbow nation.
Poetry seems to come before identity politics.
This is also true of the regional voices and languages in Foil . Their presence is not a socio-political argument but an acceptance that this sort of writing is going on all the time and is, therefore, just a part of what's going on. Aidan Andrew Dun's 'Vale Royal', Tim Atkins's 'Folklore', David Rees's 'The London', and editor Nicholas Johnson's own work all seem to fit this category. It seems to me that Foil contains a lot of work which can't really be called poetry and is only called poetry because no one can think of a better word for it. I should point out straight away that I'm not about to launch into a 'it's terrible, it doesn't scan or rhyme' diatribe.