Arts & Culture
Poetry - Surveying in verseland
Published 18 December 1998
The best anthologies are big, small, exhaustive and selective. Lavinia Greenlaw explains
Poetry anthologies should fit in your pocket, to be lived with, mulled over and dipped into. Then again they should be capacious, exhaustive and many-angled, making the case that poetry can do this and this and this. They should be surveys, tools for education and research. They should also be passionate, selective and partisan.
Two new anthologies, edited by prominent poets, manage something of most of this. Simon Armitage and Robert Crawford have collaborated on The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945 (Viking, £10.99), while Sean O'Brien has edited The Firebox: poetry in Britain and Ireland after 1945 (Picador, £16.99). These are treasure stores, valuable reference works, important soundings of the last half of a broken-backed century. The only argument I have with them is their size, which makes reading them an effort and carrying them around out of the question.
O'Brien's "after" draws a firmer line than Armitage and Crawford's "since". He starts with Basil Bunting whereas the latter allow for Louis MacNeice and Edwin Muir, whose respective poems "The Taxis" and "The Horses" never lose their shocking strangeness, an influence that resounds through the work in these two books. Both offer thoughtful introductions which emphasise pleasure and diversity while tracing the poetic economy of influence, reaction and change. There are moments, though, when the contortions involved in such an undertaking are evident, as when Armitage and Crawford say of recent work, "we tried to be as discriminatingly inclusive as we could".
The Armitage/Crawford is more cosmopolitan, and is enlivened with Stevie Smith's drawings, Ian Hamilton Finlay's typography and one of Edwin Morgan's exploding concrete poems. O'Brien's choices, though, are sometimes the more imaginative. Both books negotiate "women poets" first of all as women, when they would prefer to be discussed primarily in terms of poetics, like men.
To get a sense of the starting point of these anthologies, try Desmond Graham's excellent Poetry of the Second World War (Pimlico, £10), an international gathering that reflects all sides of the conflict. Many of this century's greatest writers were directly affected: Bertolt Brecht went into exile, Gunther Grass was conscripted at 16, Anna Akhmatova was evacuated to Tashkent, Keith Douglas was killed, Zbigniew Herbert was in the Polish resistance and Paul Celan in a labour camp. Their work sits here alongside that of unknowns, including anonymous children from the ghetto of Terezin.
"Away and read Masefield's Cargoes," exhorts Paul Muldoon's mother in his poem "Profumo". There's no better place to read it than in Christopher Reid's Sounds Good: 101 poems to be heard (Faber & Faber, £7.99). "Cargoes" has perhaps the most opulent opening line ever: "Quinquereme of Nineveh from distant Ophir", a golden "patterning of sounds" which is the subject of this magnificent little book. There is the intensifying, punctuating "blue" and "dark" of D H Lawrence's "Bavarian Gentians"; the gulping caesurae of Ben Jonson's elegy for his son; Muldoon's exotic abecedary in "The Birth"; the syncopated repetitions of Elizabeth Bishop's "The Bight"; and Emily Bronte's caged- animal rocking rhythm in "Fall leaves fall". Reid provides an exemplary introduction and notes full of insights into how poems are made and work.
Three new books of comic poetry reach a consensus I wouldn't argue with: Anon, Belloc, Betjeman, Carroll, Lear and Nash. Wendy Cope, too, appears in all three, but her own selection in The Funny Side: 101 humorous poems (Faber & Faber, £7.99) is disappointing. There are fewer old chestnuts than in the others but too many arch poems about poems, too few surprises and too many that don't raise a laugh on rereading. Nonetheless, Christopher Logue's lugubrious "Rat, O Rat", Simon Armitage's "Very Simply Topping up the Brake Fluid" or John Betjeman's "Executive" should force a smile at the very least.
Jane Bown's famous portrait of Betjeman guffawing on a clifftop turns up on the cover of Classic FM's One Hundred Favourite Poems (Hodder & Stoughton, £5.99), but it has been tarted up, coloured in, to sell this slapdash book. The introduction by the DJ Mike Read is littered with typos, while his biographies are clumsy and glib. His listeners voted for safe favourites such as "Macavity", "The Owl and the Pussycat", "The Jabberwocky" and "Mr Toad", but also demonstrate that terrible British weakness for something twee, exemplified in their number one choice, "The Alto's Lament" by Bob the Organist.
The Nation's Favourite Comic Poems, edited by Griff Rhys Jones (BBC Books, £5.99), isn't much better. Can "I always eat peas with honey" raise a laugh among the over-fives? Rhys Jones's patronising introduction admits that poets "of wit, invention and style" such as Pope and Donne are under-represented, but he withholds more of their work as being only for the erudite. As for his claim that "poets these days have all become sit-down comedians" - all good poetry has music and some of it has jokes, but it doesn't want to be the new comedy any more than it wanted to be the new rock'n'roll.
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