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| Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times |
| Edited by Neil Astley |
| Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2002 496pp, £10.95 |
Review by Deborah Tyler-Bennett  |
| Some poetry anthologies are for keeping by the bedside rather than on an ordered shelf. When I was a child I remember reading and re-reading Louis Untermeyer’s collection, The Golden Treasury of Poetry, particularly for Alfred Noyes’s ‘The Highwayman’ with its plunging rhythm of hoof beats. Likewise, the Walter de la Mare anthologies proved to be books that were impossible to read just once. As an adult, I still return to both Untermeyer and de la Mare, whilst adding new anthologies to my collection. Recently, there have been some wonderful titles to add, from Michael Longley’s elegant collection of Irish poetry for Faber (2002) to the truly outstanding Salmon collection of Irish women’s poetry, edited by Joan McBreen (The White Page: An Bhileog Bhan, 1999). Another truly great anthology has been Frank Ormsby’s collection of short Irish poems from the Blackstaff Press (The Hip Flask, 2000), whilst Virgil Suarez and Ryan G. Van Cleave have edited an anthology of poems about displacement (American Diaspora, University of Iowa Press, 2001) producing a collection that is, likewise, breathtaking. Yet, perhaps Neil Astley’s collection for Bloodaxe is one of the most ambitious titles yet. Staying Aliev is an international anthology of what are described as 500 life-affirming poems. The poems take the reader on a journey between birth and death, with speculations on the after life and the nature of art along the way. Of course, as with any anthology there are omissions that seem obvious – for example, I couldn’t conceive of an anthology of this nature that ignored the great Orcadian poets George Mackay Brown and Edwin Muir or, for that matter, Ciaran Carson’s Belfast poems. There are also the poems that seem less vital than others to individual readers (I have trouble fully enjoying Selima Hill’s poems as they always seem a little over quirky to me). Having said this, such private rumblings seem to go with the territory of an anthology, and this is a great anthology. Indeed, the trouble in reviewing a book of this nature is that there is so much to enjoy that it is difficult to know where to begin. I found poems here that I’d loved for ages, and poems that were real nuggets ripe for discovery. James Wright’s wonderful lyricism is best savoured in lines such as those that close ‘A Blessing’, where the poet witnesses two horses who welcome himself and his friend into the Minnesota landscape and concludes ‘if I stepped out of my body I would break/ into blossom’ (228). There are lyrically wonderful poems by Patrick Kavanagh, Wislawa Szymborska, and Ken Smith. Personally, I was glad to re-discover Galway Kinnell’s ‘The Bear’ with its imagery of hunter and prey and incredibly tight, sensual lines such as ‘the chilly, enduring odor of bear’ (63). Weldon Kees’s eerie ‘Robinson’ becomes doubly haunting when one is told that the poet himself disappeared in 1955. I knew Kees through his tightly controlled sestina ‘After the Trial’ (to be found in Eavan Boland and Mark Strand’s Norton anthology The Making of A Poem (2000)) but this was the first time I’d come across ‘Robinson’ with its chilling images of erasure: ‘the pages in the books are blank,/the books that Robinson has read’ (411). Kathleen Jamie’s poems about childbirth from her volume Jizzen (1999) are, likewise, memorably precise. If I had to choose my favourite poems from this anthology, I would be hard-pressed as there is so much to ponder and memorise. Paul Durcan’s ‘The Bloomsday Murders’ is moving beyond words, as is Tony Harrison’s ‘Book Ends’ concerning the death of his mother. As an absolute devotee of Edward Thomas, the inclusion of ‘As the Team’s Head Brass’ (perhaps one of the best poetic examples of the power of blank verse) and ‘The Combe’, delighted me. ‘The Combe’ with its wonderfully controlled metrics and use of near rhyme (‘dark’ and ‘chalk’, for example, or ‘briar’ and ‘juniper’) seems to be one of Thomas’s most under-rated poems. Included in a section titled ‘My People’ it is both elusive and economic, with its disturbing final lines: ‘But far more ancient and more dark/ the Combe looks since they killed the badger there,/ Dug him out and gave him to the hounds,/ that most ancient Briton of English beasts’ (307). Lastly, one of the best aspects of this anthology from the point of view of using it for teaching are the helpful notes and the excellent construction of it by Neil Astley. The section on metrics is clear, and the glossary is thorough. There are also interesting lists of accessible further reading. Each section of the book has an appealingly written introduction by Astley, which readers new to poetry will, I think, find both clear and stimulating. All in all, whether purchased as textbook, evening read, or gift, this is a wonderful collection that should be kept nearby for re-reading. Above all, this is a book that affirms the relationship between poem and reader, or as Alden Nowlan’s poem ‘An Exchange of Gifts’ states: ‘As long as you read this poem/ I will be writing it’ (443). |
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