This new anthology from Bloodaxe, edited by Roddy Lumsden, is their second such offering in recent months, arriving hot on the heels (in poetry terms) of their last, Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (September, 2009); that anthology concentrated on newness and this one in many ways is no different, aiming to introduce its readers to recent breakthroughs and developing undercurrents.
For the last few decades any generational anthology worth its salt has redefined, reinterpreted and distilled the contemporary poetic moment to join the dots with a certain political conviction. Lumsden’s approach is different and represents a directional shift, or at least a break, he would rather ‘spread the word’ than the doctrine, as he explains in an introduction entitled ‘The Pluralist Now’, and he does this by drafting in a raft of poets from across the British Isles and Ireland to fashion a sprawling anthology of some 85 contributors. This shift in emphasis is refreshing; rather than having an enforced polemic, the poems are left open and malleable, the reader is allowed, to a large degree, to imprint their own significance or meaning upon them, to pick away over time, and this means they are much more tactile things. Tellingly the cover of the book has no names emblazoned across it which may be a reflection of this new impartiality.
We get, in typical Bloodaxe style, an author photograph and a crisp pre-amble introducing each poet, giving biographical information and inklings as to that poet’s pre-occupations, style and themes, these are useful and not too directive. The book is laid out alphabetically and as an organizing element this ensures parity is maintained pretty well, each poet by my count getting no more than five poems apiece, and with such a volume of poems it makes navigation a lot easier on the reader.
Without manifesto or direction from the integral structure though, it is occasionally difficult to see where the impetus and incentive lie here, other than in a final editorial decision, what there is to make this a compelling read and keep it relevant for both poetry aficionados and a more general audience alike, both important factors for an anthology of this kind. Wasn’t the over-riding agent in, for example, Morrison / Motion’s Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (Penguin, 1982) and Paterson / Simic’s New British Poetry (Graywolf Press, 2004), however much they are revered or disliked, the fact that they were intent on dividing rather than conquering, and isn’t this why we use them as such firm reference points today? The variety of subject matter and differing backgrounds of the poets here goes some way to make up for this, what you take with you, will stay with you and everyone else will have to hope their poems endure in other minds, (it’s a case of rummaging around a bit in amongst the background noise to find what particularly appeals to you and this sense of discovery, the unexpected taking the place of the prescribed, is liberating. I suppose that may well be Lumsden’s point, as he states in his introduction, ‘the predominant social and cultural phenomena of the 1990s and 2000s have been diversity and information overload.’)
Amongst the big-hitters of the current poetry scene represented here, 2009 TS Eliot recipient Jen Hadfield, 2007 Forward Prize winner Daljit Nagra, Alice Oswald and Paul Farley to name only a few, there are some newer names; Patrick Brandon’s poem The Sloping Pitch tells of the struggles falling asleep in a tent that is located on a gradient and uses a measured, exact vocabulary; the pressure is in all the right places and the poem ends with a great simile: ‘the yaw of the ground rolling us together / as if all night rounding a corner at speed.’
David Briggs’ poem Asking the Difficult Questions directly follows this and its ‘deserted house’ poses some interesting questions about real and imagined surroundings, where its protagonist might: ‘set coat hangers jangling, / run a finger through dust on the dresser; / collapse on mouldering bedclothes, sigh / from his stomach, sleep through the sirens – far-off, / somewhere other; and hunker there gladly: his head / a deserted house, into which no one has broken.’
While we’re at it, it is worth quoting Leontia Flynn’s Airports for the astonishing opening lines alone: ‘Airports are their own peculiar weather. / Their lucid hallways ring like swimming pools. / From each sealed lounge, a pale nostalgic sky / burns up its gases over far-flung zones, / and the planes, like a child’s mobile, hang at random.’
There are also some noteworthy allusions here, Gwyneth Lewis’ Night Passage to Nantucket appears to describe the journey of a doctor or nurse and their patients upon the ferry implied in the title: ‘I sat outside, / watched the (search) light swinging as if it could feel / the port side cans and starboard cones, / reading the fairway by floodlit braille.’ It’s a really evocative, lucid poem, obviously and successfully drawing on Lowell, summoning in a more abbreviated form atoms of the atmosphere of his much longer, sequential poem; less successful is Ailbhe Darcy’s The Art of Losing, who with a title like that clearly has some nerve, but the poem itself seems to add nothing to Bishop’s original idea, there is no obvious development to take this off somewhere new, which might have allowed Darcy to get away with it, because of this it stands out a mile. Her poem, Crossing, however, is adept, subtle and understated, developing a graceful metaphor between a sword swallowing act and crossing a border by train in which Darcy utilises some potent imagery, such as: ‘Your throat becomes the rut for the runners of a sleigh, / your tonsils lean to lick at it, / the metal of your fillings sings, / your tongue tastes the cold, a long, cold drink.’ The poem explores and prompts connections between our individual experiences of the everyday, observable world.
Looking elsewhere, Lumsden can find no place for Irish poets Conor O’Callaghan, Tom French, Justin Quinn, John Redmond or Mary O’ Donoghue, which, to me at least, seems like a big oversight, as these are all skilled poets who more than deserve a place alongside any of those included here and fit in with the restrictions Lumsden has imposed – no translations and a general ruling that poets on or over the 50 mark, unless first published after 2000, are too old to be considered ‘new’ -; O’Donoghue, in particular, should have been a shoo-in, given her interest in the feminine voice, and Bloodaxe’s recent attempts to address male-female imbalances in poetry and this anthology’s pluralist intentions, although it does have a majority of female writers. These restrictions also mean poets of the caliber of Fergus Allen and Gerald Dawe slip under the radar.
On the British side of things Don Paterson, whose outstanding book Rain just won the Forward Prize, is a badly felt omission. Perhaps this relates to Lumsden’s desire to move away from the typical anthology style, whereby one, two or three poets are positioned as leading figures or benchmarks; maybe Paterson represented one too many, it’s something of a puzzler. Mick Imlah, Robin Robertson, John Ash and Lavinia Greenlaw are other notable exclusions and it would have been good to see contributions from Stephen Romer, James Womack, (though if memory serves correctly his inclusion in Voice Recognition might have put him out of the running), Jonathan Morley and James Byrne; I’m sure there are others.
Forgetting this, Identity Parade, with its shifting of focus from traditional lyric ‘page’ poetry, through to poetry of a more conceptual or abstract leaning, poems that have grown out of a devotion to word-play such as those by Matthew Caley, or out of an atmosphere of live performance, as in those by Matthew Welton, (whose inspired and often bizarre – in the best possible way – sets I have been fortunate enough to catch in Manchester), is a diverse and far-reaching survey that takes in many of the good things that are going on in British and Irish poetry right now, and offers a broad insight into how poems are being written today. This is a fine selection and there is a neat balance in the contributors, with a host of recognisable names likely to draw in more casual readers and introduce them to newer and less well represented poets; for that it should be given credit, it has found a niche occupiable enough to make it deserving of a place in the anthology section of all poetry bookshelves.
Simon Haworth