Fishing by Obstinate Isles explores the relations of recent British and American poetries, challenging American views of a British poetry dominated by antimodernism while discussing the role of rhetorics of national identity on both sides of the Atlantic in the persistence of these views. Devoting its most extensive commentary to a collection of British modernist and postmodernist poets, it attacks the relegation of British poetry to the zones of the quaint, making a compelling case for renewed engagements with fields of British poetry deserving of attention.

"One hopes that this book heralds and signals both more and less polemicism: fewer attacks on spurious straw figures and the passing of judgment based on prejudice, but more explanation, analysis, and reading of the poets and poetry on their own terms." —Contemporary Literature