Though poets have always written about cities, the commonest critical categories (pastoral poetry, nature poetry, Romantic poetry, Georgian poetry, and so on) have usually stressed the rural, so that poetry can seem irrelevant to a predominantly urban population. This book seeks to redress the balance. It explores a range of contemporary poets who are concerned with the contemporary urban scene, seeking the often cacophonous music of what happens here. Streetwise (literally) rather than "meadow-wise", some of these urban poets are already well-known, for example, Ken Smith, Iain Sinclair, Roy Fisher, Edwin Morgan, Sean O'Brien, Ciaran Carson, Peter Reading, while others are writers whose work is now beginning to attract significant critical attention: W. N. Herbert, Matt Simpson, Douglas Houston, Deryn Rees-Jones, Denise Riley, Ken Edwards, Levi Tafari, Aidan Hun, and Robert Hampson.