Hull Poets:

a group of poets active in that city between 1975 and 1981; their work was collected in Douglas Dunn's edition of A Rumoured City (1982), for which Philip Larkin wrote a foreword. Dunn was closely involved in the emergence of much of their writing. Of the poets featured in A Rumoured City, Tony Flynn and Peter Didsbury had published substantial collections shortly before the anthology's appearance; Sean O'Brien, Douglas Houston, Frank Redpath, and T. F. Griffin subsequently produced volumes to favourable critical receptions, and work by Ian Gregson, Margot K. Juby, Tony Petch, and Genny Rahtz has been widely published in periodicals. Other poets closely associated with the above include George Kendrick, whose Bicycle Tyre in a Tall Tree (1974) won high acclaim, and Julian Smith, whose Sampler appeared in 1992. No clear similarities of manner are identifiable in the work of the Hull Poets, though their best work is noted for its imagination and technical accomplishment in both traditional and innovative verse forms. The eclectic periodical Bête Noire, edited by John Osborne, has sustained a high level of poetic activity in the city through the successful series of poetry readings which commenced in 1985.