Penguin’s iconic Modern Poets series, which was first launched in the early 1960s with the writings of authors from Lawrence Durrell to Stevie Smith, is being revived this summer to introduce a new generation of poets.

Home to anthologies including 1967’s The Mersey Sound, which featured the work of the Liverpool poets Roger McGough, Brian Patten and Adrian Henri and sold more than half a million copies, the Penguin Modern Poets series aimed to “introduce contemporary poetry to the general reader”. There were 27 volumes in the first incarnation, each containing “representative work” by three modern poets, with the selection made “so as to illustrate the poets’ characteristics in style and form”.

The series ran from 1962 until 1979, placing Smith alongside Geoffrey Hill and Edwin Brock, and Allen Ginsberg next to Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. It was revived in the 1990s for a three-year run during which Penguin teamed up writers including Simon Armitage, Sean O’Brien and Tony Harrison, and Carol Ann Duffy, Vicki Feaver and Eavan Boland.

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Penguin poetry editor Donald Futers, who is relaunching the series in July with If I’m Scared We Can’t Win, featuring the work of Anne Carson, Sophie Collins and Emily Berry, said that he felt the time was right to bring it back.

“There’s a strong case for our finding ourselves right now in a golden age for poetry. Between creative writing programmes, an abundance of new publications, the ever-growing popularity of spoken word and performance poetry – think of Kate Tempest, or Warsan Shire – and a new generation made unprecedentedly available to one another across national boundaries by the internet, exciting poetry … is being written on a staggering scale,” said Futers. “The time is ripe for this revival of the Penguin Modern Poets.”

The first collection places the work of the acclaimed and prize-winning Carson against the writing of the London-based Berry, whose first collection Dear Boy won a Forward prize, and Collins, whose first collection is due out next year. “All three write fascinatingly about female experience from present-day Britain to ancient Greece,” said Penguin.

“These are three people at different stages of their writing careers,” added Futers. “Sophie Collins and Emily Berry have both been influenced by Anne Carson’s work and have taken it in creative and fascinating ways, so the hope is that people will come to the collection who might not know Sophie and Emily but who like Anne Carson, and whose experience of reading Anne Carson might be deepened by reading her in the context of these younger poets.”

The second collection, Controlled Explosions, collects the work of the US poets Michael Robbins and Patricia Lockwood with that of the writer Timothy Thornton, who is based in Brighton. “All three write very different poetry but have a madcap energy and a keen sense of humour,” said Futers.

The third collection brings together the work of the award-winning US poet Sharon Olds with that of Warsan Shire, the Somali-British poet who was named the first Young Poet Laureate for London at just 25 and who was quoted on Beyonce’s latest album, and the poet and spoken-word artist Malika Booker.

Futers intends to release a new collection every three months. “At the minute, the series is potentially infinite, but I have the first 12 already planned out,” he said. “In the past, the series has been incredibly successful – when I’ve talked to people about the fact I’m starting a new series up, they consistently tell me how much they loved the old one.”

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In total, the previous Penguin Modern Poets series covered 81 poets, taking in, the publisher said, “every school of poetry then current, from the anti-modernist Movement poetry of Kingsley Amis to that of Tom Raworth, whose aim as a member of the British Poetry Revival was precisely to counteract what he and his cohort saw as the Movement’s pernicious influence.

“There was room alike for RS Thomas’s Welsh nationalism and spirituality, and John Ashbery’s dogged refusal to make any kind of paraphrasable sense for more than a few lines at a time; Charles Bukowski sat a mere five books from Geoffrey Hill and Stevie Smith, themselves an inventive pairing; the ninth volume saw Denise Levertov, then early in her career, rub shoulders with the recently-deceased William Carlos Williams,” said Penguin.

“It was held very dear by a lot of people, and the books are still sought out in secondhand bookshops,” said Futers.