Staying Alive Real Poems for Unreal Times Neil Astley

  

STAYING ALIVE

r e al poems for unr eal times

  

'This is a book to make you fall in love with poetry ... G o out and buy

^- it for everyone you love' CHRISTINA PATTERSON, Independent

'A revelation ... An anthology like this should make poetry reviewers feel

not just enthusiastic but evangelical. Buy it. Leave it around the house.

Give it to friends. It could keep them alive'

• JOHN CAREY, Sunday Times

  

'Anyone who has the faintest glimmer of interest in modern poetry

must buy it. If I were master of the universe or held the lottery's purse

strings, there would be a copy of it in every school, public library and

hotel bedroom in the land. On page after page I found myself laughing,

crying, wondering, rejoicing, reliving, wishing, envying. It is a book full of

hope and high art which restores your faith in poetry'

• ALAN TAYLOR, Sunday Herald

  

'The book is without equal as a handbook for students and readers'

^- SIAN HUGHES, Times Educational Supplement is a book which leaves those who have read or heard a poem 'Staying Alive

from it feeling less alone and more alive. Its effect is deeply political - in a

way that nobody ten years ago could have foreseen. Why? The 500 poems

in it are not political as such. But they have become subversive because

they contest the way the world is being (and has been) manipulated and

spoken about. They refuse the lies, the arrogant complacencies, the weak­

kneed evasions. They offer 500 examples of resistance' -JOHN BERGER

  

'One should only read books which bite and sting one.

  

If the book we are reading does not wake us up with

a blow to the head, what's the point in reading?

A book must be the axe which smashes

the frozen sea within us.'

  FRANZ KAFKA

  

'If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold

no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry.

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were

taken off, I know that is poetry.'

  E MILY DICKINSON

  

ALSO NOW AVAILABLE FR OM BLOODAXE:

BEING ALIVE: the sequel to Staying Alive

editor Neil Astley has assembled this lively companion

  Staying Alive

anthology for all those readers who've wanted more poems that

touch the heart, stir the mind and fire the spirit. Being Alive is about

being human: about love and loss, fear and longing, hurt and wonder.

  

'I love and keep going back to it. is just as vivid,

Staying Alive Being Alive

strongly present and equally beautifully organised. But this new book

_{- -} feels even more alive think it has a heartbeat'

  I MERYL STREEP

BLOODAXE WORLD POE T S SE RI E S:

  

I : Alden Nowlan: Between Tears and Laughter: Selected Poems

_{NEIL ASTLEY}

2: Mary Oliver: Wild Geese: Selected Poems

founded Bloodaxe Books in 1978, and was given a D.Litt by

  

Newcastle University for his pioneering work. As well as Staying Alive and

Being Alive, he has edited over 800 poetry books, and has published several

other anthologies, including Poetry with an Edge, New Blood, Pleased to See Me,

and Do Not Go Gentle: poems for funerals, and two poetry collections,

  

Darwin Survivor and Biting My Tongue. His first novel, The End of My Tether,

was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award; his second,

The Sheep Who Changed the World, is due out in 2005.

  

STAYING ALIVE

real poems for unreal times

edited by

NEIL ASTLEY

  

BlroDAXE BCOK5 Selection, introduction and notes copyright 2002 Neil Astley.

  ©

  Copyright of poems rests with authors and other rights holders as cited in the acknowledgements on pages

  473-79, which constitute an extension of this copyright page.

  ISBN: 1 85224 588 3 First published 2002 by

  Bloodaxe Books Ltd, High green, Tarset, Northumberland NE48 l RP.

  Sixth impression 2004 www.bloodaxebooks.com For further information about Bloodaxe titles please visit our website or write to the above address for a catalogue.

  Bloodaxe Books Ltd acknowledges the financial assistance of Arts Council England, North East.

  c, C.0{/1- ...._ (' Q:o _{,_.} - <

  <) � 4'Glf>.�

  This book is published with the support of the Lannan Foundation, with special thanks to J. Patrick Lannan for making it possible.

  LEGAL NOTICE All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the copyright holders listed on pages

  473-79.

  Bloodaxe Books Ltd only controls publication rights to _not poems from its own publications and does control rights to most of the poems published in this anthology.

  For Simon

  Printed in Great Britain by

  CONTENTS

  Kevin Hart

  Osip Mandelstam

  48 Poppies in October

  Sylvia Plath

  

48 Temptation

  Nina Cassian

  

47 Dark Angel

  46 FROM A Gilded Lapse of Time

  David Constantine

  Gjertrud Schnackenberg

  45 Variation on a Theme by Rilke

  Denise Levertov

  44 FROM The Tenth Duino Elegy

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  44 Encounter

  49 'Eyesight of Wasps'

  

49 The Wasps

  43 Prayer

  52 Where We Are

  Elizabeth Garrett

  

55 The Bay

  James K. Baxter

  55 The Road Not Taken

  Robert Frost

  2 Roads and journeys

  Stephen Dobyns

  Charles Simic

  51 ]arrow

  Carol Rumens

  51 Saint Animal

  Chase Twichell

  50 Watering the Horse

  Robert Bly

  50 The Old World

  Czeslaw Milosz

  Carol Ann Duffy

  Various

  Andrew Greig

  

33 Happiness

  Raymond Carver

  32 Northern Morning

  Alistair Elliot

  I This Life

  31 Orkney

  31 Living

  33 My Father's Irish Setters

  Denise Levertov

  I Body and soul

  28 Wild Geese

  Mary Oliver

  19 Introduction

  Neil Astley

  18 Poets on poetry

  James Merrill

  Vernon Scannell

  

43 A Prayer

  Elizabeth Bishop

  Michael Longley

  41 An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow

  Les Murray

  40 He Sits Down on the Floor of a School for the Retarded

  Alden Nowlan

  39 Chemin de Fer

  

38 The Hug

  35 Legs

  Tess Gallagher

  

37 The Hug

  Thom Gunn

  36 Naked Vision

  Gwen Harwood

  36 homage to my hips

  Lucille Clifton

  56 Tyranny of Choice Simon Armitage

  57 Poem

  Muriel Rukeyser

  82 Alone

  Tomas Tmnstromer

  81 Machines

  Michael Donaghy

  81 Happiness

  Stephen Dunn

  80 Yes

  79 When You've Got

  83 Couplings

  Helen Dunmore

  78 The Journey

  Mary Oliver

  77 That Silent Evening

  Galway Kinnell

  76 The Cablecar

  Lawrence Sail

  Menna Elfyn

  William Stafford

  Vladimir Holan

  95 Trillium

  Christopher Logue

  97 The Arrow

  Marin Sorescu

  97 Stonepicker

  Frieda Hughes

  96 'I saw the daughter of the sun ... ^'

  Elizabeth Daryush

  Jaan Kaplinski 95 'To eat a pie and to have it ... ^' Louise Gluck

  84 Traveling through the Dark

  3 Dead ^or alive

  92 Wife Hits Moose

  Thomas Lux

  87 The Moose

  Elizabeth Bishop

  

86 Slow Animals Crossing

  84 Penitence W. N. Herbert

  John Burnside

  75 Snow

  75 History

  Carl Sandburg

  60 Begin

  Delmore Schwartz

  63 The Bear

  Galway Kinnell

  61 Integrity

  Adrienne Rich

  60 Entirely

  Louis MacNeice

  Brendan Kennelly

  John Berryman

  59 You

  Dennis 0 'Driscoll

  58 'i thank You God for most this amazing'

  E.E. Cummings

  58 Meeting in a Lift

  Vladimir Holan

  58 Choose

  66 The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me

  67 FROM Dream Songs

  Maura Dooley

  Gillian Allnutt

  74 History

  Paul Muldoon

  74 Snow

  Louis MacNeice

  73 Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

  Robert Frost

  72 The Road Home

  71 Directive

  Tracey Herd

  Robert Frost

  70 The Door

  Kapka Kassabova

  69 The door

  Miroslav Holub

  68 Window

  Freda Downie

  67 FROM Some mangled dream songs for Henry

  98 Be Not Too Hard Vona Groarke

99 Tonight of Yesterday

  James Wright 123 A Note Left in Jimmy Leonard's Shack Bertolt Brecht 124 Epistle on Suicide

  Jenny Joseph 1 17 Warning Theodore Roethke 11 7 Dolor

  Elizabeth Bishop 118 One Art Louise Gluck 119 Lamium

  May Sarton 119 A Glass of Water Stephen Dunn 120 Sadness Stephen Dunn

  121 Sweetness

  Alden Nowlan

  122

The Execution

  Stevie Smith 124 Harold's Leap Anne Sexton

  Maura Dooley 116 What Every Woman Should Carry Ruth Fainlight

  125 Her Kind

  Tracey Herd

  1 26 Anne Sexton's Last Letter to God

  Robert Frost 128 My November Guest Edward Thomas 1 28 She Dotes

  R. S. Thomas 1 29 The Cry Vachel Lindsay 130 The Leaden-Eyed

  Ezra Pound

  130 And the Days Are Not Full Enough

  116 Handbag

  Hayden Carruth 100 Sonnet James Wright 100 Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm

  William Empson

  Brendan Kennelly 103 My Dark Fathers Kit Wright 104 Hoping It Might Be So

  101 Missing Dates

  Weldon Kees

  101 Villanelle

  Gjertrud Schnackenberg

  102 Signs

  Galway Kinnell 103

  FROM When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone

  Charles Wright 105 Clear Night Robert Bly 106 Defeated

  Elma Mitchell 114 Thoughts After Ruskin Elizabeth Bartlett

  Theodore Roethke 106 The Waking Kapka Kassabova 107 Mirages

  Eibhlin Nic Eochaidh 108 How to kill a living thing Anne Michaels

  109 FROM

  Sublimation

  Chase Twichell 110 Horse Eilean Ni Chuilleanain Il l Swineherd

  Kathleen Jamie Il l The way we live Connie Bensley 112 Apologia

  Rosemary Tonks 113 Addiction to an Old Mattress Fleur Adcock 113 Things

  115 Themes for Women

  4 Bittersweet

  Derek Mahon

  Fleur Adcock

  155 Kissing

  Leland Bardwell 155 How my true love and I lay without touching Basil Bunting 156 'You idiot! ... '

  Randall Jarrell 157 90 North E.}. Scovell 158 Listening to Collared Doves

  David Constantine 159 Watching for Dolphins Jo Shapcott 160 Goat

  Peter Didsbury 161 The Drainage Helen Dunmore

  162 Three Ways of Recovering a Body

  Ted Hughes 163 Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days Sylvia Plath 164 Mushrooms

  166 A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford

  Michael Longley

  John Burnside

  167 Unwittingly

  Ken Smith

  171 Being the third song of Urias

  Sujata Bhatt 172

  

White Asparagus

  Alden Nowlan 173 It's Good To Be Here Kathleen Jamie 174 Ultrasound

  Helen Dunmore 178 Safe period Kona Macphee 178

  IVF

  154 Thaw

  Michael Longley 154 At Poll Salach Edward Thomas 154 Thaw

  Matthew Sweeney

  Philip Gross 140

  133 Tube Ride to Martha's

  Peter Reading

  133 FROM

  Ukulele Music

  Ken Smith

  135

Against the grain

  Wislawa Szymborska 135 The One Twenty Pub lzet Sarajlic 137 Luck in Sarajevo Michael Longley 137 All of These People

  Muriel Rukeyser 138 Waking This Morning Douglas Dunn 138

  

I Am a Cameraman

  FROM The Wasting Game

  Adrienne Rich 151 Diving into the Wreck Richard Wilbur 153 April 5, 1974

  Leontia Flynn 143 Brinkwomanship Ken Smith

  144 Here

  U.A. Fanthorpe

  144 The Unprofessionals

  Stewart Conn

  145 Visiting Hour

  Carole Satyamurti 145

  FROM Changing the Subject

  Nick Drake 150 The Cure Charles Simic 150 Past-Lives Therapy

5 Growing up

  Maura Dooley 181 Freight Sharon 0/ds 181 First Birth Sharon 0/ds

  A Part of Speech

  202 The Back Seat of My Mother's Car

  Louise Gluck 203 Mirror Image Sylvia Plath 203 Mirror

  Anne Carson 204 Father's Old Blue Cardigan Philip Larkin 205 This Be the Verse

  Caitriona 0 'Reilly 205 Possession Randall Jarrell 206 A Night with Lions

  Joseph Brodsky

  207 FROM

  Edward Thomas

  201 Those Winter Sundays

  209

Old Man

  Randall Jarrell 211 Thinking of the Lost World Paul Muldoon 213 Quoof

  Hart Crane 214 Forgetfulness Billy Collins 214 Forgetfulness

  W.S. Merwin 215 Unknown Forbear David Scott 216 Groundsmen

  Les Murray 218 Pigs Dennis O'Driscoll 218 Experimental Animals

  Alden Nowlan 219 Weakness Stephen Dobyns

  220 Spiritual Chickens

  Julia Copus

  Robert Hayden

  182 Her First Week

  Cinders

  Anne Stevenson 183 The Spirit is too Blunt an Instrument Gavin Ewart 184 Sonnet: How Life Too Is Sentimental

  Anne Stevenson 184 Poem for a Daughter Ellen B1yant Voigt 185 Daughter

  Adrian Mitchell 186 Beattie Is Three W.D. Snodgrass 186

  FROM Heart's Needle

  Gjertrud Schnackenberg 191 Supernatural Love Brendan Kennelly 193 Poem from a Three Year Old

  Roger McGough 194

  Kenneth Rexroth

  201 'We were so poor. .. ^'

  195 A Sword in a Cloud of Light

  Janos Pilinszky 197 On the Back of a Photograph Fleur Adcock 197 The Video

  P.K. Page 197 Young Girls

  Adrian Mitchell 198 A Puppy Called Puberty Adrian Mitchell 199 A Dog Called Elderly

  Paul Muldoon 199 Cuba Michael Donaghy

  200 My Flu

  Charles Simic

6 Man and beast

  Nina Cassian 222 Sacrilege Elena Shvarts 223 Remembrance of Strange Hospitality

6 Riordain 227 Switch

  Caitriona 0 'Reilly 244 Octopus Pablo Neruda 245

  237 Cow

  Katrina Porteous

  238 Seven Silences

  Jo Shapcott

  239 Lies

  Vicki Feaver 240 Glow Worm Jorie Graham 241 Salmon

  Richard Murphy 242 Seals at High Island Chris Greenhalgh 243 Of Love, Death and the Sea-Squirt

  Stephen Knight 245

  Fable of the mermaid and the drunks

  236 The Strange Case

  The Mermaid Tank

  Edwin Morgan 246 The Loch Ness Monster's Song Gwendolyn MacEwen 247 The Death of the Loch Ness Monster

  Seamus Heaney 248 Oysters

  Paul Durcan 250 My Beloved Compares Herself to

  a Pint of Stout

  Deborah Randall 251 Finney's Bar Tracy Ryan 252 Bite

  Selima Hill 252 Desire's a Desire

  Selima Hill

  Michael Ondaatje

  Julie 0 'Callaghan 224

  James Wright 227 A Blessing Michael Longley 228 The Horses

  

Federal Case

  Frank O'Hara

  224 Animals

  Charles Simic

  225 'The city had fallen ^{. . .}

  ' Robert Adamson

  225 The stone curlew

  Polly Clark 226 My Life with Horses Sean

  Seamus Heaney 229 The Skunk Thom Gunn 229 Considering the Snail

  Swans Mating

  Fleur Adcock

  230 For a Five-Year-Old

  Ted Hughes

  231 Full Moon and Little Frieda

  Frieda Hughes 231 Birds John Montague

  232

The Trout

  Susan Wicks 233 Night Toad Sheila Wingfield 233 A Bird

  John Kinsella 234 Emu Hunt Lavinia Greenlaw 234 Night Parrot

  Ted Hughes 235 The Thought Fox Michael Longley 236

7 In and out of love

  C.K. Williams 254 Love: Beginnings

  Pauline Stainer 255 The Honeycomb Michael Longley 255

  The Linen Industry

  Sharon 0/ds 256

  

Last Night

  Janos Pilinszky

  257 Definition of Your Attraction

  Michael Ondaatje

  257 The Cinnamon Peeler

  Sharon Olds 259 True Love W.H. Auden 259 Lullaby

  Julia Copus 261 In Defence of Adultery Rita Ann Higgins 261 The Did-You-Come-Yets

  of the Western World

C. K. Williams 263 The Mistress

  Zoology Is Destiny

  281 After the End of It

  When You Are Old

  Micheal O'Siadhail 290 Between W.B. Yeats 290

  Conrad Aiken 288 The Quarrel Kapka Kassabova 289 And they were both right

  James McAuley 286 Because PK. Page 287 Cross

  Self Pity Song

  Kit Wright 284 The All Purpose Country and Western

  Nina Cassian 282 Lady of Miracles Fleur Adcock 283 Advice to a Discarded Lover

  282 Hesitate to Call

  Louise Gluck

  282

Relationship

  Janos Pilinszky

  Rosemary Tonks 280 Badly-Chosen Lover Anne Stevenson

  Salvatore Quasimodo

  Katherine Pierpoint 278 This Dead Relationship Stephen Dunn 280 Each from Different Heights

  Carolyn Kizer 276 Bitch Eleanor Brown 277 Bitcherel

  Selima Hill 274 Don't Let's Talk about Being in Love Katie Donovan 275 Yearn On

  

The Room

  Kevin Hart 274

  August

  Sharon Olds 263 Ecstasy Linda France 264

  Snow Melting

  Judith Wright 268 Woman to Man Gjertrud Schnackenberg 269

  Philippe Jaccottet 267 Distances David Constantine 268 'As our bloods separate'

  Jo Shapcott 265 Muse Jo Shapcott 266 Life

  265 Only if Love Should Pierce You

  Esta Spalding 270 Zbigniew Herbert 291 Conch

  WH. Auden 292 '0 tell me the truth about love'

  Meg Bateman 293 Lightness James Fenton

  294

In Paris with You

8 My people

  297 'The East West border ^{. .}

  Peter Reading 311

  Paul Muldoon 324 The Sightseers Charles Simic 324 Dream Avenue

  Colette Bryce 323 Break Seamus Heaney 323 The Toome Road

  The Language Issue

  Patrick Kavanagh 321 Inniskeen Road: July Evening Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill 322

  Bernard O'Donoghue 320 Westering Home Gillian Clarke 321 Overheard in Co. Sligo

  319 Synopsis of the Great Welsh Novel

  Harri Webb

  319 Reservoirs

  R. S. Thomas

  WN. Herbert 318 The King and Queen of Dumfriesshire

  Tom Leonard 317 The Voyeur

  Kit Wright 316 Everyone Hates the English Andrew Sa/key 317 A song for England

  Ken Smith 315 After Mr Mayhew's visit Roy Fisher 315 The Nation

  FROM Evagatory

  G.F. Dutton 310 passage Roddy Lumsden 311 An Outlying Station

  .' Kona Macphee 297 My People

  309 Kith

  Jaan Kaplinski

  Windscale

  Norman Nicholson 307

  Philip Pacey 306 Charged Landscape: Uffington Edward Thomas 307 The Combe

  Joanne Limburg 304 Barton-in-the-Beans Esther Morgan 305 The Reason

  Peter Didsbury 303 In Britain Anne Rouse 304 England Nil

  Going On

  302 FROM

  Peter Reading

  The Door

  Tony Harrison 301 Turns David Constantine 301

  Stuart Henson 299 The Heron Jo Shapcott 300 A Letter to Dennis

  Anna Akhmatova 298 Our Own Land Richard Wilbur 299 A Summer Morning

  John Heath-Stubbs 308 The Green Man's Last Will and Testament Robyn Bolam

  Langston Hughes 326 I, Too Fred Voss 326 Making America Strong lmtiaz Dharker

  Czeslaw Milosz 336 My Faithful Mother Tongue Adam Zagajewski 337 Betrayal

  341 Death by Meteor

  George Szirtes

  340 The Coming of the Plague

  Auden 340 Gare du Midi Weldon Kees

  W H ^.

  Glyn Maxwell 338 We Billion Cheered C.P. Cavafy 339 Waiting for the Barbarians

  FROM What the Light Teaches

  327 They'll say, 'She must be from another country'

  Anne Michaels 335

  Jo Shapcott 333 Motherland Anna Akhmatova 334 'That city that I have loved'

  Carol Ann Duffy 332 In Your Mind Sophia de Mello Breyner 333 Homeland

  Jane Griffiths 331 Emigrants Grace Nichols 332 Epilogue

  Moniza Alvi 330 Exile Sophia de Mello Breyner 331 Exile

  329 Modern Secrets

  Jackie Kay 329 In my country Shirley Geok-lin Lim

  Jamie McKendrick 342 Ancient History

9 War and peace

  Miroslav Holub 346

  16 June 1997

  Bruce Weigl 360 On the Anniversary of Her Grace Carolyn F01·che 361 Selective Service

  WH. Auden 357 September I, 1 939

  Geoffrey Hill 356 September Song Bertolt Brecht 356 There is no greater crime than leaving

  Keith Douglas 354 Vergissmeinnicht Mairi Macinnes 355 The Old Naval Airfield

  FROM The T.E. Lawrence Poems

  Gwendolyn MacEwen 352

  Michael Longley 350 Ceasefire Paul Durcan 351 The Bloomsday Murders,

  The fly

  Isaac Rosenberg 348 Returning, we hear the Larks Edward Thomas 349 As the team's head-brass

  348 Everyone Sang

  Siegfried Sassoon

  347 For Wilfred Owen

  Freda Downie

  347 Anthem for Doomed Youth

  Wilfred Owen

  Kate Clanchy 345 War Poetry Carl Sandburg 345 Grass

  Jo Shapcott 362

  Phrase Book

  Robert Graves 363

  The Persian Version

  Tony Harrison 364

  Initial Illumination

  lngeborg Bachmann 365 Every Day Cesar Vallejo

  366 FROM

  Spain, take away this cup from me

  Wislawa Szymborska 367 The End and the Beginning Thomas Lux 368 The People of the Other Village

10 Disappearing acts

  Thomas Blackburn 372 Now Light Congeals Charles Simic

  Thom Gunn

  She

  Thom Gunn 392 The Reassurance Theodore Roethke 392

  392 Inside Our Dreams

  Howard Nemerov 391 The Vacuum Jeanne Willis

  390 About Death

  Page

  Alden Nowlan 389 This Is What I Wanted to Sign Off With Tess Gallagher 390 Wake P.K.

  389

Sorting Through

  Liz Lochhead

  388

Metamorphosis

  Pamela Gillilan 388 Four Years Caroline Smith

  David Constantine 386 Boy finds tramp dead John F Deane 387 On a Dark Night

  384

The Gas-poker

  

Scattering Ashes

  372 Psalm

  David Scott 384

  G. F Dutton 383 Death in October David Constantine 383 'Pity the drunks'

  Mimslav Holub 382 The dead Giista Agren 382 Death's Secret

  Michael Hartnett 381 Death of an Irishwoman Michael Longley 381 Water-burn

  380

Funeral Blues

  Frances Horovitz 371 Rain- Birdoswald Michael Longley 371 Bjorn Olinder's Pictures

  379 'Do not stand at my grave and weep' W.H.

  Anon

  379 Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

  Ellen Bryant Voigt 378 For My Mother Dylan Thomas

  Carolyn Kizer 376 Thrall Tony Harrison 377 Bookends (I)

  Philip Larkin 374 Aubade Jaan Kaplinski 375 'Death does not come from outside . ^{. .} ' A.E. Housman 376 'Good creatures ... '

  373 Someone

  Dennis O'Driscoll

  Auden Pablo Neruda 394 Dead Woman Tess Gallagher 395 Yes

  Andrew Motion 395

  41 4 Moment

  Weldon Kees 41 1 Robinson Sophia de Mello Breyner 411 Night and the House

  Miroslav Holub 41 2 Distant Howling

  Janos Pilinszky 414

  Homage to Isaac Newton

  Robin Robertson 41 4

  

New Gravity

  Adam Zagajewski

  Yannis Ritsos 415 Morning Moniza A/vi 415 The Other Room

  409 As It Should Be

  Miroslav Holub 416 Brief reflection on accuracy Simon Armitage 417 Zoom!

  Seamus Heaney 418

  FROM Lightenings

  Ellen Hinsey 418 On the Uncountable Nature of Things Amy Clampitt 420 The Sun Underfoot among the Sundews

  James Harpur 421 'I stretch my arms' James Merrill 421 A Downward Look

  Charles Causley

  422

  I Am the Song

  Amanda Dalton 409 How to Disappear Vona Groarke 410 Folderol

  Derek Mahon

  Close

  Vladimir Holan 400

  Sophia de Mello Breyner 396

  

Inscription

  E.E. Cummings

  397 'Buffalo Bill 's'

  Billy Collins 397 The Dead Tadeusz Rozewicz 398 Proofs

  Anne Carson 398 On Walking Backwards Stephen Dobyns 399 Cemetery Nights

  Stephen Dunn 400

  Father, Mother, Robert Henley who hanged himself in the ninth grade, et al

  

Resurrection

  Sleep with a Suitcase

  Charles Causley

  401

Eden Rock

  Jo Shapcott 402 When I Died Dana Gioia 402 All Souls'

  Philippe Jaccottet 403

  FROl\1 Lessons

  August Kleinzahler 405 Where Souls Go Brad Leithauser 405 A Mosquito

  Louise Gliick 406 The Wild Iris Derek Mahon 407 Antarctica

  Paul Muldoon 407 Why Brownlee Left Matthew Sweeney 408

11 Me, the Earth, the Universe

  Derek Walcott

V. Lalic 424

  Chase Twichell 446

  FROM Songs from Below

  Archibald MacLeish 441 Ars Poetica W.S. Graham 442 The Beast in the Space

  Alden Nowlan 443 An Exchange of Gifts Helen Ivory 443

  Note to the reader: this is not a poem

  Robert Hass

  444 Meditation at Lagunitas Jaan Kaplinski 445 'Once I got a postcard ... ^'

  Tomas Transtrijmer

  445

From March

  1979

  Animal Languages

  Kit Wright 437 The Other Side of the Mountain

  Vasko Popa 446

  The Story of a Story

  Wallace Stevens 447

  Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself

  Eamon Grennan 448

  Detail

  Rita Dove 448 b Mark Strand 449 Eating Poetry

  Howard Nemerov 450 The Painter Dreaming

  in the Scholar's House

  Philippe Jaccottet 440

  437

Mountains

  423 Earth

  T.S. Eliot 427 Journey of the Magi Wallace Stevens 428 The Snow Man

  Sheila Wingfield

  423 Waking

  Ivan

  Places We Love

  R.S. Thomas 424

  

Moorland

  Robin Robertson

  425 Three Ways of Looking at God

  Kerry Hardie 426 The Avatar Alden Nowlan 426 Sacrament

  Patrick Kavanagh 428 Sanctity R.S. Thomas 429

  Alice Oswald

  

Via Negativa

  Charles Simic 429

  To the One Upstairs

  Tomas Transtriimer

  430 Tracks

  Elizabeth Jennings 431 Delay Norman MacCaig 431 Summer farm lain Crichton Smith 432 Tinily a star goes down

  Carol Rumens 432 Star Whisper Gwyneth Lewis 433

  FROM Zero Gravity

  Jane Cooper 434 Rent Elinor Wylie 435 Full Moon

  Kapka Kassabova 435 Preparation for the big emptiness Elizabeth Bishop 436 The Shampoo

12 The art of poetry

  Galway Kinnell 454 Oatmeal Patrick Kavanagh 455 Consider the Grass Growing

  Joan Brossa 455

  

Note

  Seamus Heaney 456

  Postscript

  Raymond Carver

  456 Late Fragment

  Neil Astley 458 The Sound of Poetry

  

464 Glossary

471 Further reading 473 Acknowledgements 480 Index of writers 486

  Index of titles and first lines

  

POETS ON PO ETRY

Coleridge: 'Poetry; the best words in the best order.'

  'Poetry is the art of using words charged with their

  Dana Gioia:

  utmost meaning.'

  

Keats: ' It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest

  thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.'

  Yeats: 'Poetry is truth seen with passion.'

  'Sir, what is poetry?'

  Boswell:

  'Why Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all

  Johnson:

  know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.'

  

Christopher Logue: 'Poetry cannot be defined, only experienced.'

Wordsworth: 'Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge

  . . . Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity . . . '

  

T.S. Eliot: ' . . . it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without

  distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences . . . a concentration which does not happen consciously or deliberation . . . Poetry is not a turning loose from emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.'

  

David Constantine: 'It is a widening of consciousness, an extension

  of humanity. We sense an ideal version when we read, and with it arm ourselves, to quarrel with reality.' 'My poems do not turn out to be about Hiroshima,

  Sylvia Plath:

  but about a child forming itself finger by finger in the dark. They are not about the terrors of mass extinction, but about the bleakness of the moon over a yew tree in a neighboring graveyard . . .In a sense, these poems are deflections. I do not think they are an escape.'

  Archibald MacLeish:

  A poem should not mean But be. R.S.

  Thomas:

  Poetry is that which arrives at the intellect by way of the heart.

  

INTRODUCTION

  The best contemporary poetry is life-affirming and directly relevant to all our lives. Yet most of us could only name one or two modern poems which have moved us profoundly and unforgettably. These are the kinds of poems which speak to us with the same unnerving power now as when we first came across them, like W.H. Auden's the clocks . . . ') 'Funeral Blues' in Four Weddings and a Funeral ('Stop all and Dylan Thomas's 'Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night'. And there are also those rare poems we encounter almost by accident. That short poem we stared at, read and re-read, on the under­ ground or subway train. Or the one photocopied by a friend, now a personal talisman pinned to the kitchen noticeboard or kept in a wallet, the poem which says everything about Life, the Universe and little me. They're like word-of-mouth books, because a poem which makes important personal connections for a trusted friend is likely to affect you in similar ways.

  Such poems are remarkable because there seem to be so few of them. Or so we believe. For most people think contemporary poetry is either boring and irrelevant or pretentious and superficial. And that these single, powerful poems are somehow the exceptions. But they aren't. One of the problems with modern poetry is that because there is so much of it - and so many poems hold little interest for the general reader - you don't know where to find those exceptional poems. I hope you'll discover many such gems in this book.

  Staying Alive is quite unlike any other anthology. It doesn't just give you 500 exceptional poems by all kinds of poets from around the world, it is a book with a particular vision of what poetry should be about - drawn from the poems themselves, not the critical rep­ utations of the poets. I've been editing and publishing poetry now for nearly 30 years, so Staying Alive is the culmination of one com­ mitted reader's lifetime trawl through thousands and thousands of poems; it also includes poems recommended over the years by friends and writers whose taste I trust. It is a book about what poetry means and how it can help us as people. A book about staying alive.

  Many people turn to poetry only at unreal times, whether for consolation in grief or affirmation in love. This book includes many of the great modem love poems and elegies, such as those by Auden and Neruda which reached a wider audience through recent films, as well as many less familiar but equally powerful poems about love and death. But Staying Aliu also shows the power of poetry in celebrating the ordinary miracle, taking you, the reader, on a journey around many of the different aspects of life explored in poems. David Constantine believes that poetry 'helps us understand common things better'. A poem is not just for crisis.

  I've put Kafka's comment about books which 'bite and sting' at the front of Staying Alive because there are many poems here which 'wake us up with a blow to the head'. Kafka says a book 'must be the axe which smashes the frozen sea within us'. Yet poems with that kind of power are rarely simplistic and often formally complex. Their immediacy and directness are the result of skilful but unob­ trusive artistry. The poem and the "message" are one and the same thing. The paraphrasable meaning is less than the poem itself. What affects you is the experience of reading or re-reading the poem. For if what the poem says could be expressed by some other means, in prose or through conversation, you wouldn't need the poem. Basil Bunting always stressed the importance of the sound of the poem. 'Poetry, like music, is to be heard,' he wrote, believing that without the sound, readers would look at the lines of a poem as they look at prose, 'seeking a meaning. Prose exists to convey mean­ ing, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That is not poetry's business.'

  Staying Alive has many poems written in response to unreal times which have great personal force for readers faced with similar trib­ ulations in their own lives, like Mary Oliver's 'Wild Geese' (see page 28) as well as her 'Journey' (78). Such poems can be so valuable to us that they become personal mantras, poems to be committed to memory and taken fully to heart. When Nehru lay dying, he had written out the last verse of Robert Frost's 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' (73) on a piece of paper by his bed, and kept _. repeating the lines ('And miles to go before I sleep . . . ') Another Frost poem, 'The Road Not Taken' (55), became America's favourite modem poem because it encapsulates everyone's anxieties about the roads we take - or might have taken - in life. Stevie Smith's 'Not Waving but Drowning' (57) has a similar force, contrasting the pro­ active approach to life we'd all like to take with the passive one we too often end up taking. Many of the poems in the second Roads section of Staying Alive dramatise these kinds of life decisions: the journeys we take, the roads we choose or have chosen for us.

  I have tried to create a selection which has its own internal drama, so that different kinds of poems seem to answer or echo one another, developing a theme in such a way that the reader engages with what they say as a whole as well as with the poems individually. Some of these links reflect actual connections between certain poets. I have also selected poems which contradict one another, and set them side by side. In the third Dead or Alive section, poems about depression are immediately followed by others which lift you out of sadness into assertion. I've used oppositions of this kind through Staying

  Alive because, as William Blake says, 'without contraries is no progression', and just as Blake gives you his Songs of Innocence and Experience, here you will find body and soul, war and peace, God and atheism. Such a structure mirrors that of the poem. Readers often say they are drawn either to the emotional power or to the intellectual complexity of a poem, but all good poetry enacts an interplay between thought and feeling, challenging the intellect at the same time it draws on emotion. The American poet Theodore

  as

  Roethke said a poet should think by feeling. The same is true of reading. Randall Jarrell said you need to read good poetry 'with an attitude that is a mixture of sharp intelligence and of willing emotional empathy, at once penetrating and generous'.

  Like this book's selection, its subtitle Real Poems for Unreal Times is double-edged. These are poems which relate to times which feel unreal as we experience extremes or anxieties in our lives, whether in response to love or death, or to how we deal with change, dis­ ruption or simply with living from day to day. But these are also poems relating to the unreal times we live through as people, poems in which language is used with the primal force and feeling too often lost in a modern world which insists on instant comment and immediate communication, in which time is money and everything is costed. And yet sensitivity to language is what distinguishes us as civilised people, both human beings and as individuals, registering

  as

  our intelligence as well as our alertness and attention to the lives of others. A poem lives in its language, which is body to its soul. Joseph Brodsky believed that our purpose in life as human beings was 'to create civilisation', and that 'poetry is essentially the soul's search for its release in language'.

  Seamus Heaney thinks that poetry has a special ability to redress spiritual balance and to function as a counterweight to hostile and oppressive forces in the world. He calls this 'the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality'. Heaney's personal mantra is a phrase by an earlier Nobel prizewinner, the Greek poet George Seferis, who felt that poetry should be 'strong enough to help', by which he didn't mean 'the kind of strength that is supposed to come from reading books of an uplifting nature' but rather that he valued poetry's 'response to conditions in the world at a moment when the world was in crisis'. This is what Heaney calls 'redress', whereby 'the poetic imagination seems to redress whatever is wrong or exacerbating in the prevailing conditions', offering 'a response to reality which has a liberating and verifying effect upon the individual spirit . . . tilting the scales of reality towards some transcendent equi­ librium . . . This redressing effect of poetry comes from its being a glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential that is denied or constantly threatened by circumstances.'