NEIL ASTLEY (editor)
Staying Alive
Bloodaxe £10.95

I had an exchange recently with a friend, a talented poet, about Seamus Heaney’s essay ‘Joy or Night’ (in Finders Keepers).Heaney there speaks highly of ‘Aubade’, Larkin’s celebratedly gloomy poem about the fear of death, but is worried by its final failure, as Heaney sees it, to uphold the human spirit in its continual struggle against a bleak materialism to which life is nothing more than a random manifestation of the laws of chemistry. ‘Aubade’ adds weight, says Heaney, ‘to the negative side of the scale’; it reneges on ‘the spiritual intellect’s great work’ of affirmation. By contrast, Yeats’s poem ‘The Man and the Echo’, from which that last phrase is quoted, acknowledges very clearly the fear and despair Larkin’s poem embodies, but keeps the mind’s options open and contrives ‘to pronounce a final Yes’.

I praised this essay warmly, speaking to my friend. He, however, had a very different take on the matter. Heaney, he said impatiently, was being moralistic. The task of a poem is not to uphold the human spirit, but to be true to feeling, whatever the feeling may be. ‘Aubade’, in my friend’s opinion, is a great poem precisely because it conveys so powerfully the comfortless terror that Larkin experienced.

I take this exchange as a starting point in considering this new anthology from Bloodaxe, Staying Alive, because Neil Astley has, he tells us, selected the poems in it for their life-affirming qualities. He presents it as a very unusual project. It’s a selection of poems in English from the past hundred years (though particularly from the past thirty), and it’s highly personal. In his introduction, Astley writes that it is ‘the culmination of one committed reader’s lifetime trawl through thousands and thousands of poems... a book about what poetry means and how it can help us as people. A book about staying alive.’ (That’s a bit obscure, but it sounds like two criteria to me: personal favourites, and poems that ‘help us’ somehow.)

When people talk about ‘what poetry is’, a certain inflatedness is apt to creep in. One of the principal epigraphs of this anthology (which is almost as full of quotations as it is of poems) is Kafka’s: ‘One should only read books which bite and sting one... A book must be the axe which smashes the frozen sea within us’. Well, ho-hum. Occasionally a book may have this sort of power (and if it does it probably depends as much on the transient mental state of the reader as on the abiding merits of the book) — far more often some more modest goal, to move, to delight, to record, describe, amuse will capture a poet’s aim more accurately. If a little patch of someone’s frozen sea melts for a moment, in tears, laughter, or any other emotion, the poem will have done a great deal.

But an anthology has to sell itself somehow, and the marketing of this one has been impressive. (It comes garlanded with quotes from the likes of Mia Farrow, Philip Pullman and Helena Kennedy QC, and sold 35,000 copies in its first six months.) Not an anthology of ‘great’ poems, or an attempt to reveal or establish a new school or a new style,
it is designedly popular, and includes likable poems in all styles — from highly formal, like Dylan Thomas’s villanelle ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’, to relaxed conversational pieces like Selima Hill’s ‘Cow’ (to take two examples more or less at random).

Classically excellent and ambitious poems, like Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘One Art’, Auden’s ‘Lullaby’, Cavafy’s ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’, Derek Mahon’s ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’, rub shoulders with Lucille Clifton’s ‘Homage to my Hips’ or the anonymous ‘Do not stand at my grave and weep’, which is most commonly, in my experience, found on tombstones. (At this point I feared Astley’s populism was at risk of collapsing into demagoguery.) He also includes a nice poem by Christopher Logue, which I took to provide a helpful reminder to the book-reviewer:

Be not too hard for life is short
And nothing is given to man.

Astley divides his huge number of poems into twelve sections: Body and Soul, Roads and Journeys, Dead or Alive, and so on. To each section he provides a down-to-earth, user-friendly introduction, with a few words indivdually about many of the particular poets or poems. This is excellently done, and helps greatly in the anthology’s educative function. His taste is democratic and encompassing. He includes dozens of poets, many of them women (and many who will be familiar to readers of Poetry London: Gillian Allnutt, Moniza Alvi, David Constantine, Jane Duran, Selima Hill, Frieda Hughes, Kathleen Jamie, Roddy Lumsden, Carole Satymurti, Jo Shapcott, Matthew Sweeney...); when he includes great names, he often represents them by their less grand pieces. (And often, it must be said, by poems that are rather well-worn: Yeats: ‘When you are old’, Auden: ‘Lullaby’, Frost: ‘The Road Not Taken’ — nothing wrong with these poems, but they have a slight air of being soft options.) The result is an extremely attractive, easily enjoyable anthology, which fulfils its primary intention of making poety accessible to the many people who ordinarily shy away from it.

Readers of Poetry London, however, probably don’t usually shy away from poetry. What does this selection have to offer them?
Firstly — and this simple point is really high praise for any anthology — even regular readers of poetry will meet many moving poems they don’t already know, and might never otherwise encounter. E. J. Scovell’s touching and sad ‘Listening to Collared Doves’, Alden Nowlan’s unnerving ‘The Execution’, James Fenton’s comic/lugubrious ‘In Paris with You’, Eamon Grennan’s extraordinary ‘Detail’ — all these were new to me, and all in very different ways are enjoyable. That is the first function of an anthology: for its designated audience, those who rarely read poetry, this one fulfils it admirably; and for those who read more, it will still fulfil it in part.

Secondly, there is something engaging about Astley’s project in itself. He is the founder of the excellent Bloodaxe poetry-publishing house, and is a lover of poetry who has here put together an anthology of poems which are his personal favourites. I daresay many of us do this from time to time in fantasy; Astley has done it in reality, and there is a special interest in the collection precisely because it represents a single well-informed and enthusiastic sensibility.
So much amiability blunts the paws of this amiable reviewer! But if we ratchet up our demandingness a bit, we are bound to notice that there is a price to pay for selecting poems on a basis of ‘likability’ rather than the more forbidding ‘excellence’. Excellence compels you to be exclusive; likability invites inclusiveness. Lots and lots of poems are more or less likable. But then, on what basis are the (inevitable) exclusions made? There are many poems in this anthology which are perfectly all right, it would be churlish to single them out to object to them; yet there is no obvious reason why they have been chosen in preference to others.

As a Scot, for example, I wondered why three of our older Scottish poets, Norman MacCaig, Edwin Morgan, W.S. Graham, are included — but not Hugh MacDiarmid, Robert Garioch, George Mackay Brown, George MacBeth, Ian Hamilton Finlay or Alan Jackson, all of whom, in my opinion, have written poems at least as good as the bulk of this anthology (and in the case of MacDiarmid, Garioch and Finlay, often way above it). I suspect there is no answer to this question: the criteria are simply too subjective and indefinite.

And the criterion Astley does single out, that of ‘life-affirmingness’, doesn’t really withstand serious scrutiny. In view of my exchange with my friend about Larkin’s ‘Aubade’, I turned at once to the index to see if it is included. It is! (so too is a poem by Miroslav Holub, ‘The dead’, which Heaney quoted in support of his doubts about ‘Aubade’). Astley presumably disagrees with Heaney — perhaps he would agree with my friend. And of course, it is easy to argue that ‘Aubade’ is really ‘on the side of life’ because, despite its angry, depressed tone, it portrays accurately a certain mood — one which most of us have probably experienced at some point and perhaps are relieved to find that someone shares. And the brilliance of the writing — especially in the final lines, as so often with Larkin — carries its own affirmation.

But to say this is really to negate the value of ‘life-affirmingness’ as a criterion for selection. If a description of hopeless fear can be called life-affirming, then what does the notion of life-affirmingness not include? Every poem, provided it is truth-telling and well-written, can be seen as life-affirming, and the nub of the criterion shifts from affirmation to the truth and quality of the writing. And if it shifts there — shouldn’t we have been going for excellence all along?

In short, there is a certain smoke-and-mirrors element in the stated rationale for this anthology and its curious title. It is better seen as a personal, inevitably rather arbitrary selection of 500 poems, almost all of them enjoyable and accessible and some of them superb, nicely and intelligently introduced, and an excellent anthology to recommend to someone who knows little about recent poetry (or to give them as a present). It doesn’t replace existing good anthologies like The Rattle Bag (edited by Heaney and Hughes) or Emergency Kit (edited by Shapcott and Sweeney), let alone The Oxford Book of English Verse (edited by Christopher Ricks), all of which have more comprehensible and demanding principles of selection, but it excellently fulfils a rather different function as an introduction and a tantalising assortment of hors d’oeuvres.

D.M. Black’s Collected Poems 1964-87 (Polygon) was published in 1991, and his translations of Goethe have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry London and other journals. His website is www.dmblack.co.uk.