sheenaghpugh | Entries tagged with anthologies

This is an anthology of poems, prose pieces and artwork celebrating “the sacred feminine, Brigid, and the heritage of Kildare”. It becomes obvious quite soon that “Brigid” is but one avatar in a long line of female figures of worship going back through mythology to the great Asian goddess variously known as Cybele, Isis, Lady, Mother and much else. The “brideog” dolls which are dressed in white and resemble slightly potato-faced children were once made of straw, which betrays their origin as corn-doll fertility symbols. Indeed Katie Donovan’s poem “Charm” references not Brigid but that other famous feminine symbol Venus of Willendorf, “totem of pleasure and plenty”, powerfully contrasting her “yeasty curves” with the stick-thinness of starvation or anorexia. Jesse Hill’s macaronic “Selkie, Find Your Skin” uses the Scottish Gaelic myth of the seal trapped in the skin of a woman, while Lenore Hart’s “Lady of the Beasts” has for its title yet another name by which the Great Goddess was known, and for its theme another of her attributes, as a guardian of animals. A more modern myth of Hans Andersen’s surfaces at the end of Claire Blennerhassett’s “Feabhra” (February, the month of Brigid’s feast day), in which an idyllic portrayal of a little girl is undercut by the sinister ending:

your playful feet
dancing in red
t-bar shoes.

Though mythology is at the back of everything, there are several pieces set in the present day, in which the image of Brigid acts to empower a woman – in Caroline Busher’s prose piece “Brigid and the Heart-Shaped Womb”, not only does water from Brigid’s well help a post-menopausal woman to become pregnant, a sense of Brigid’s determination and agency seems to enable her to discard an unsatisfactory former flame; her feelings go from “there was something about him that she found impossible to resist” to “He was no more than just a face in the crowd”. And in Catherine Anne Cullen’s sharp “Brigid of the Bargain Bins” a modern-day Brigid proves a match for the harsh circumstances of her life:

She checks the prices of sliced pans,
weighs up own labels against known brands.
She knows they cut corners with prices,
sees through their tricks, has a few of her own.

The third element in the title, “the heritage of Kildare” perhaps features less obviously than the others, but in the prose piece “Strong Bridgets” by Alison Wells, the landscape comes across very clearly:

Decanted suddenly, as a young child, into landscape. Bequeathed an inheritance of bogs, wide skies, rock castles, pools of frog spawn, moss and furze and rushes, holly trees and hideaways. A V-shaped valley between hills, like arms opening out, like a cloak thrown across vastness, marram grass rippling, folding, silk, spreading and settling all round.

This is an anthology of poems, prose pieces and artwork. Though the artwork is scattered throughout, the anthology seems otherwise to have been arranged with mainly poems in the first half, prose in the second. I’m not entirely sure this is the best way of doing it; sometimes after a longish piece of prose one welcomes the different kind of concentration, shorter but more intense, that a poem needs.

Brigid’s blue cloak, reminiscent of how the Virgin Mary is so often portrayed, marks her as, like Mary, an attempt by the adherents of a monotheist religion to make up for the lack of a female deity (ironic, really, that she is no longer officially a saint, having been dropped from the calendar by Pope Paul VI on the ground that there’s no evidence she actually existed). One does wonder if the Vatican’s real problem with her was that she shared too many attributes, including her name and feast day (Imbolc, February 1st), with a pagan Irish goddess. In this anthology Monica Corish’s “Keepers of the Flame”, an excerpt from a novel, imagines a meeting between the two. There are aspects of her, like her association with metalwork, that are strangely un-nunlike, and one of her miracles, in which she helps an unwillingly pregnant woman by making the embryo “disappear without pain” (see Maureen Boyle’s “St Brigid in the Orchard”) must have raised some clerical eyebrows. I don’t suppose her de-listing will have stopped folk celebrating her feast day and legends, in which she “exists” in a different way from that envisaged by Paul VI.

The thing about the Greek Anthology; it is universal in a way so much poetry aspires to be. It deals with universal human concerns, which is why it lends itself not just to straight translation but to re-making in other contexts. There is some of both here. Constantine’s translation of an epigram of Leonidas of Tarentum is fairly straight:

This here is Clito’s bit of a dwelling, this
The bit of land he sows, that there’s
His vineyard, that his wood, both scant. Nevertheless
Among these meagre ownings Clito’s clocked up eighty years.

This felt oddly familiar, and was, but not via Leonidas. I was recalling the Orkney poet Robert Rendall:

Look! This is Liza’s but and ben,
Wi’ screen o’ bourtrees tae the door,
Her stack o’ peats, her flag-roofed byre,
Her planticru abune the shore;
Yet ‘mang her hens and household gear
She’s brucked aboot for eighty year.

Constantine is himself a fine poet and his versions of the Anthology poets are as sensitive and effective as one might expect. The poets he has chosen are a personal selection. The predominance of Leonidas must be a personal preference, and understandable, because the man was such a superb epigrammatist that one wonders if there has ever been a better. Constantine also makes a point of foregrounding the female poets who are often overlooked, especially Anyte of Tegea, whose work also fits in with a thread of kindness to animals that runs through the selection – this concern for nature and our fellow creatures will resurface in the Coda, a section of his own poems inspired by the Anthology. Anyte was clearly an animal lover, and several of the Anthology poets express indignation at ill-treatment of horses or sympathy for injured dolphins, seen as friendly to man. Perhaps the most moving is Addaeus of Macedon, praising a grateful farmer:

When his labouring ox was worn out by old age and the furrows
Alcon, reverencing him for his service, led him not to the slaughter
But to a meadow of deep grass. There how this fellow creature
When Alcon strolls out to visit him at the hour of shadows
In grateful delight lifts up his head and bellows!

“This fellow creature” – we do not often think of the ancient world as a kindly place for other species, but some of the Greek anthology poets clearly had a sense of fellowship with them.

This kinship with animals is a major theme of the epigrams he has chosen. So are human relationships, often expressed in the sense of loss on the death of friends or kin, and the often troubled relationship between humans and their environment, especially the sea, on which so many Greeks found both a living and their death.

In the “Coda” we have a further development, wholly original poems constructed on the acknowledged model of the Anthology poems. Many are full of contained anger and sadness both at what we do to each other:

Laws of war

We too had laws of war: don’t poison wells
Don’t fell the olive trees (they take so long to grow)
Don’t bomb the schools, don’t bomb the hospitals …
Stranger seeking our monument, look around you.

and at what we do to the environment and to other creatures:

Albatross chick

Opened, this babe’s full stomach looks like a trove
Of bright things stowed away for an after-life.
What we cast on the waters is not the food of love.
Nothing will come of us for you but grief.

Perhaps the two most striking examples concern the death of children. In the main body of the work, he translates Zonas, being as universally relevant as any poet has ever been:

Dour ferryman, coming for the child Euphorion
When you hush your prow through the reeds and touch the shore
Be kind. His father, standing in the muddy shallows
Will hand him up the plank. Reach down, Charon
Bring him carefully on board. Those are his first sandals,
His pride and joy. But his footing in them is still unsure.

And then we have Constantine’s own take on a child in the aftermath of war:

Child After.

Over and done with. All gone.
She is too small to be left on the road alone.
Another day, another night, will nobody come?
Death will, a kindness, and take her home.

I found it interesting to compare Constantine’s versions with those of Dudley Fitts in his “Poems from the Greek Anthology” (1978). Fitts’s choice was often different, he translated many more humorous poems, but when he and Constantine translate the same poem, you couldn’t say one version was better than another, more that they have looked at the poem from slightly different angles. But that’s the Anthology for you: new to everyone who reads it and the proof that ancient models still say something to living poets. Genius can’t date.

Now they say the Taliban has changed. But how could they change without reading a book? If a person never reads a book, how can he change?
(“Blossom”, by Zainab Akhlaqi)

Shaherbano, the girl who utters this magnificent contempt for ignorance, will die in an attack on a girls’ school, which the Taliban have targeted because they, like her, know the power of education, though unlike her they also fear it. I don’t think I have ever read a book that breathes such a passion for learning as this collection of stories. They come from both urban and rural women all over Afghanistan, written in Dari and Pashto, collated by the organisation Untold, translated into English by Afghan women and men, at a time when the Taliban were busy repossessing Kabul. One story was hand-written, photographed and sent via a chain of WhatsApp messages.

Unsurprisingly, there is a considerable undercurrent of bitterness and irony in many of them, as when the protagonist of Marie Bamyani’s “The Black Crow of Winter” reflects: “If only I had a relative who worked as a government official, he would have helped us. I couldn’t think of anyone. Poor people have poor friends.” The narrator of Sharifa Pasun’s “What Are Friends For?” is similarly acerbic: “Thank god, I said to myself, that the sun is not someone’s property, otherwise I’d have to pay rent for that as well.”

Yet these authors are also keenly aware of the small sensual pleasures of the world around them, its sights, sounds, smells, tastes: “The sound of the azan broke through the dark blue and orange atmosphere of the evening. The smell of onion and tomatoes filled the alley, where you could guess what each neighbour was having for dinner” (“The Worms”; Fatima Saadat). There is a strong feeling that escaping to another country, though it might solve many problems, would leave them with a terrible sense of loss. They also value individual acts of kindness, female solidarity, the fellow-feeling that keeps people going. It can’t be denied that a great many of Afghan women’s problems stem from Afghan men. Yet there are allies too, as we see from the male students refusing to take their university exams in solidarity with their sisters, and there is a remarkable sense of balance in these stories. For every cruel husband in these stories, there is a loving one, for every father who does not value daughters, another who does. Indeed, these authors are forgiving enough sometimes to take a male protagonist and think their way into his head, notably in “D for Daud”, where Anahita Gharib Nawaz uses the voice of a teacher who falsely confesses to a crime to protect his student, and “I Don’t Have The Flying Wings”, where Batool Haidari movingly inhabits the consciousness of a young man who longs to be a woman.

War and violence naturally figure, in an often chillingly matter-of-fact way: “Oh God’s mercy! Who have they shot this time?” (“Haska’s Decision”, by Rana Zurmaty). So do suicide bombers, and it is notable that these are portrayed less as fighters or martyrs than as mentally disturbed people, so damaged by an unloved or low-achieving past that they have lost all normal feelings of humanity. They are to be abhorred and pitied, never admired.

The actual quality of the writing is very high. These are subtle, accomplished writers who deserve a wide readership. I think there was just one story where I thought an object was being used symbolically in too obvious a way. One testimony to their quality is that although they are deeply rooted in their own time and place and bring it vividly alive, the stories go beyond it: their concerns are universally relevant. Reading Fatema Khavari’s “Ajah”, in which the achievement of a group of women astounds their menfolk, I found myself humming the union anthem “solidarity for ever”, while in “Bad Luck”, by Atifa Mozaffari, in which a woman makes a marriage of necessity, believing her real love to be dead or exiled, I recognised an old Scottish folk motif whereby a girl marries an old man, for her family’s sake, after her sweetheart is apparently lost at the fishing. The similarity shows not that “Auld Robin Gray” is well known in Afghanistan, which would much surprise me, but that love, loss and compromise are the same the world over.

At the end of “Bad Luck”, the protagonist wastes no time in useless regrets; things are as they are, and one must make the best of them. “She no longer wondered if Ali had been thinking about her all these years. She had to worry about what to cook for dinner and how to convince her husband to remove his artificial leg at night.” The women in these stories are not passive victims of fate; they are determined to have some agency in their own lives, however circumscribed this may be by men and authority. They are brimful of small schemes to improve things; a mother scrimps enough cash to buy her son a lollipop, a widow avoids remarriage by starting a biscuit-making enterprise. Not all their schemes work; cruelty and bigotry are powerful enemies. But the determination that shines through the protagonists is the determination which caused these authors to write down and publish their thoughts, sometimes even under their own names, a piece of courage that frankly astounds me. We must hope, not only that they will not suffer for it, but that one day they will be able to be published in their own land and language. But in the meantime, enjoy this vivid, powerful, entertaining collection. The Taliban, poor ignoramuses, don’t know what they are missing.

This is an anthology of “poems for a disUnited Kingdom”, with a “state-of-the-nation” focus, as the preface calls it. The call for poems, which we’ll return to later, asked “What does it mean to be ‘British’ […] Is it possible for the Kingdom to become United? Is it even desirable?”

This remit, for all the exhortation “interpret the brief in your own way”, was clearly always going to produce highly politicised, even polemical, poetry. Whether this works depends a lot on whether the poet can come at the theme somewhat slant, creep up behind the reader with a rapier rather than charging head-on with a club. The very first poem, Jim Greenhalf’s “Imperial Exodus”, had me exclaiming out loud with admiration at its subtlety and artfulness in this regard. It is a two-parter about the end of an empire, one part in the voice of the subjugated natives soon to be free, the other in that of one of the imperialists going home. But where is “home”? Clearly, it’s Rome, and the liberated natives are British:

      Did you see it, the last boat leaving?
      Thank God they’ve gone. Good riddance.
      All these years they’ve been telling us
      what to do and how they want it done.
      Things can only get better now, they say.
      No more Pax this and Pax that.”

Or is it?

      And they called us barbarians!
      They treated us as refugees in our own country,
      changing our habits, our customs, words

The point of course is that be they Roman, British, or what you will, empires are much the same everywhere. The second voice, gloomily contemplating a return to a place which he knows is not the “home” of his imagination, if it ever was, almost certainly did once belong to some Roman centurion, and also to some hidebound British administrator nostalgic for Fifties Britain and dreading a return to its modern incarnation:

      I’m sorry to be going back.
      Nothing glorious in that old ruin
      of slaves and foreigners
      pouring like floodwater over our borders.

This poem was a terrific start to an anthology, respecting the reader’s intelligence, feeling its way into the minds of its narrators and not preaching at us. Another that impressed me greatly was Gerry Cambridge’s “The Green and the Blue”, in which our narrator must find a way of living alongside the Neighbour from Hell, aka the Glasgow Rangers fan in the downstairs flat. It isn’t just that on match days the music is ear-splitting, it’s the question, in the narrator’s mind, of motive. Is the volume accidental or deliberately aimed at him as a Catholic? Face to face, the neighbour doesn’t seem as intimidating as the narrator feared:

      An uncertain
      broken-toothed smile. Skinny as a whippet, late twenties

Yet even his apparent co-operation about the noise raises suspicions about motive:

       Next time it’s too loud
      jist come doon an chap on the door. I understand
      this puts the onus back on me by apparent sleight of hand –
      Unconscious, or sleekit ruse?

The dance of approach and retreat, reaching out and suspicion, between these two is deftly done and rather moving. It’s also, as far as I can see, deeply pessimistic. I see no way for these neighbours ever to be part of a “united” society; too much divides them and religion is actually the least of it.

Division indeed is the keynote of the anthology. Rosie Garland and Mia Rayson Regan focus on the isolation caused by covid. Others highlight the divisions of Brexit. Many centre on race, from Aamina Khan’s “Yorkshire Cricket” to Ben Banyard’s “Scottish Tenner”, a far smaller incident but almost as redolent of distrust and suspicion as “The Green and the Blue”. Sexual politics and divisions, though not altogether absent, figure less, perhaps because only about a fifth of submitted poems came from women. Meanwhile Georgia Hilton likens England, in “Oh England I Love You”, to an “ageing parent”, right-wing and xenophobic, who constantly falls for well-spoken con men. It probably seemed like a good analogy for the way electors vote against their own interests; the trouble is, it relies on an offensively ageist stereotype. Believe it or not, the elderly are not all, or even mostly, gullible far-right bigots, and if we’re accusing people of having “fallen into the black hole/of internet conspiracy theories”, I seem to come across people of all ages who do that. The way government has managed to set different sectors of the community – young and old, black and white, gay and straight - against each other to distract them from the common enemy, ie those who have the money and power and are determined to hold on to it, would have made a good poem for this anthology, but this one just feeds into the prevailing narrative.

Many will probably feel angered and alienated by one or more poems in this anthology, since alienation is at the heart of it. There is certainly plenty of energy and commitment, though humour is in short supply, an exception being William Thirsk Gaskill’s wry sideswipe at bureaucracy, “On This Occasion”. The preface mentions that many poems were rejected for being “too hectoring and didactic”. I think a few still got through. Indeed, reading the text of the open call quoted in the preface, I don’t think I have ever seen quite so many abstract nouns in one paragraph, and if I’d read the call at the time, I would certainly have assumed they wanted poems about isms and ologies rather than people. Fortunately, they didn’t always get them. A few here do strike me as too obvious, and there are a couple whose point eludes me. But the good considerably outweighs the bad, which is most of what you can ask of an anthology.

The other thing you can ask is that it fulfils whatever remit it has set itself, and I think it does, in an odd sort of way. Though covid does figure, the acrimonious division that emerged between mask-wearers and anti-maskers does not, and nor does the way this division seamlessly followed on from that of Brexit. Whichever Twitter bubble one is in, the Venn diagrams for Remainers/mask-wearers and Brexiters/covid-deniers are almost perfect circles (and I did say “almost”, so don’t bother telling me if you’re the exception). This would lead me to suppose that the natural state of this, and perhaps any, country, is tribalism rather than unity, maybe because most countries are too big to be tribes in themselves, and that people will seize on anything to argue about just for the feeling of being in one tribe and against another. The poem which best encapsulates this tribalism is Gerry Cambridge’s, but the sheer variety of divisions represented here, not to mention the seeming triviality of some of them, itself, I think, answers the question in the preface, “Is it possible for the Kingdom to become United?” Doesn’t look like it.

This is an anthology of poems published in aid of Ty Hafan, a hospice for terminally ill children in South Wales. All proceeds from sales go to the hospice; the publisher and contributors gave their work gratis. These contributors include several big names – George Szirtes, Philip Gross, Tamar Yoseloff, Rowan Williams and Pascale Petit among others, and a few poems are, fittingly, in Welsh. They also include one of mine, but as usual I have decided I can reasonably review the rest of the anthology.

The poems are themed around childhood and parenting. There is an introduction by Tony Curtis in which he outlines how the anthology came about, and one by the director of Ty Hafan in which she explains its remit. There’s also a third, which might seem like one too many, a foreword by Ilora Finlay which I think might be unintentionally misleading. Many poetry fans would read phrases like “this beautiful gentle anthology” and “poems to bring calm warmth to the reader” with apprehension, fearing that they heralded acres of sentimental undemanding hygge – I knew this couldn’t be so, but only because I knew the work of many of the poets.

In fact most of these poems are by no means “gentle”, nor aimed at providing warm fuzzies – how could they be, with such a powerful and challenging theme? Some of the children in these poems were wanted but never born; some died young or became estranged from their parents. Even in the happiest cases, children grow up and leave, while parents don’t live for ever – one of the most powerful poems here, or indeed in existence, is the late Emyr Humphreys’ “From Father to Son” with its almost unbearably moving vision of a dead father:

    There is no limit to the number of times
   Your father can come to life, and he is as tender as ever he was
   And as poor, his overcoat buttoned to the throat,
   His face blue from the wind that always blows in the outer darkness

The anthology is in three sections; the first concerns conception (or failure to conceive), birth and infancy. In this section, poems that particularly struck me were Zoe Brigley’s “Name Poem”, about the feelings of would-be parents who go home empty-handed

and intimate as a gun to the temple:
your name sounds the trigger click

and George Szirtes in his most playful and joyous mode for “New Borns”:

    What child with foreknowledge would enter the world?
   I would, said Geraldine,
   For gooseberries, geckos, goldfinches, gorgonzola,
   I would enter the world.

There’s a whole alphabet of this, and knowing that among the names are those of the poet’s grandchildren somehow adds to its delight.

The second section concerns childhood and schooldays, and the standouts here for me were Jude Brigley’s rueful musings on why children seem to recall the times one failed as a parent better than the times when one succeeded (and how appropriate that this anthology should contain poems by a mother and daughter!), John Barnie’s “Standing By”, with its perfectly judged rhythms that make one want to read it aloud, and above all, Paul Henry’s spare, taut “The Nettle Race”, short enough to quote in full:

    Tilting into the garden wall
   three boys’ bicycles,
   frieze of an abandoned race.

    Briars cover the chains,
   their absent riders’ chins.
   The tortoise rust won with ease.

Slowly the sun leans
towards its finishing line.

In the last section, focusing on increasing distance between child and parent, the scope widens and we hear, through the words of writers like Abeer Ameer, Lawrence Sail and Jo Mazelis, the voices and concerns of the displaced and endangered elsewhere in the world. In Sail’s “Childermas” the hand-holding gesture of two refugee children becomes iconic, universal:

    They are following the bent backs
   of grown-ups with bikes and bundles, heading
   for Cox’s Bazar; as always, they are holding hands.

    The last time they surfaced was in northern France, at the tail
   of a struggling queue on a beach.
   They were waiting to board an already laden
    black rubber boat – and holding hands, as always.

There are many fine, powerful poems in this anthology, and plenty of reason to buy it even without the impetus of a good cause. It can be ordered direct from Ty Hafan here.

With an anthology, one is reviewing both the individual poems and the linking concept. If I were John Carey, I fancy I would be annoyed by the description of this concept on the back cover: “an anthology of verse based on a simple principle: select the one-hundred greatest poets from across the centuries, and then choose their finest poems." This of course is preposterous: no one person could do it. You would need a committee of 25, speaking at least that many languages, and they would still be arguing by the end of the decade.

Sure enough, when one reads Professor Carey’s foreword, it becomes clear the sensible chap was attempting no such thing – in fact he was doing something far more personal. He sees the anthology as a follow-up to his A Little History of Poetry (which I haven’t read) and states “I have chosen 100 poets, mostly but not exclusively English and American, who seem to me outstanding”. As for the poem choice, “all the poems I have chosen are chosen for a single reason – that I find them unforgettable.”

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This is my month for reviewing anthologies. Two, which have in common both “100 Poems” in the title and a certain ambiguity as to the remit. I should mention that I have a poem in this one, though as usual I feel I can reasonably review the rest of it.

The introduction makes it clear that the title is deliberately “provocative”; the editors do not imagine that poems can of themselves save anything. What they hope for is that reading them can inspire people to “slow down”, “pay attention and notice what we have been missing.” So, eco-poetry, but the intro also states “we have abandoned a traditional view of “nature poetry” or “environmental writing”, especially where it sidelines particular groups (eg people of the global majority/BAME/BIPOC writers, LGBTQ+ poets, or writers with disabilities)”

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Review of Almarks: Radical Poetry from Shetland, ed. Jim Mainland & Mark Ryan Smith, pub. Culture Matters 2020

Off Skyros at midnight
The heads of the little drowned children
Gently knock against the hulls of the yachts. (Stuart Hannay)

This is an anthology of radical poems from living poets in Shetland, which at once raises the question of “what’s radical?” Jim Mainland’s introductory essay indicates that he takes it to refer both to subject matter and style. This essay is a joy in itself; I shall treasure his demolition of the buzzword “virtue-signalling” - “surely the most linguistically flat-footed of insults – imagine Shakespeare coming up with something as weak as ‘take that, you virtue-signaller!’”.

It’s arguable that writing in dialect rather than “standard” English is itself radical, and not including a glossary of dialect forms even more so. There are several poems in Shetlandic, and I found them accessible enough, but then I’ve been around the dialect for a while now. If you can follow Ola Swanson’s high-energy polemic on the locally controversial topic of windfarms, “Da Carbon Payback Kid’s Ill-wind Phantasmagoria”, you’ll be fine:

We tak in Windhoose, Flugga, an spend da night under dis baby,
da crazed Shelthead telt me, an du widna want ta dae it too often.
On migrations it’s a big bird windfeast
o waarblers an laverick tongues in aspic
an see whin a raingoose hits it’s lik instant pâté, min.

A wind-sooked inta-gridpooer guy gae me da wikiphysics
but I already hed a lingerin o it fae da Bridders Grimm.
Da whole rig set up a vibe an drave you gibberin ta money.

One thing that comes over as “radical” from this lively piece is how dialect can be employed on the most contemporary of themes, rather than being the preserve of folk song and nature poems. Laureen Johnson, in “March-past at Arromanches”, written after the 50^th anniversary of D-Day (how time does fly), uses the dialect’s homeliness to cut through the pomp and ceremony:

But oh, in every waddered face
you see da eyes o boys.

And Beth Fullerton, harking back to a time when standard English was enforced in schools, feels an instant rapport with the poem “I Lost My Talk” by First Nations poet Rita Joe in Ottawa’s Museum of Nations. It’s possible that those whose native dialect is standard English will not appreciate fully the radicalism of “Tongue”, but Welsh, Scottish and Irish readers should have no bother:

You tried to tak my midder tongue
bit sho wis always dere
waitin
beyond da riv
o your horizon

Among the non-dialect poems, Raman Mundair’s “Let’s talk about a job” is memorable both for its subject matter (a job advert for an under-qualified, compliant doctor to work at an immigration detention facility in Louisiana) and its form, which is an unclassifiable but powerful melange of poetry, prose and drama. It’s also hard to quote from, because it uses a lot of repetition to build up a huge head of quiet but boiling anger. Its understated, matter-of-fact language is the antithesis of the ranting sometimes associated with “radical” poetry and far more effective. I would love to see it performed.

There’s only one poem by co-editor Jim Mainland, which is modest of him but a pity, I think, because he is in many ways one of the most radical writers in Shetland and any anthology of contemporary radical Shetland poems that doesn’t include his poem “Prestidigitator” has a serious lack. There are also several images (I think mainly abstract paintings though some might be photos) by Michael Peterson, including the cover image reproduced here.

Declaration of interest: there are also three of mine here, but as usual I decided it was reasonable to review the rest of the anthology.

This being an anthology, the quality, as always, is variable. There are some pieces I like less than those above, and all readers will find that so – nor will the poems they like necessarily be the ones I like. But they should all find a lively, thought-provoking body of work from a great variety of artists. One radical aspect of this anthology is its inclusiveness: we have as many female writers as male, including a trans female writer, and though BAME voices are thin on the ground in Shetland, the most striking piece in the anthology is from an Indian-born Shetlander, Raman Mundair. An almark, by the way, is a sheep that habitually breaks bounds. It’s a good word.

This is an anthology of poems inspired by aspects of Scotland and predicated on the idea that Scotland is a place with a split personality, veering between extremes. The editors put up online a list of topics, which were then chosen by individual poets. In fact the topics came in pairs, though the poets worked alone, to suggest these extremes.

I'm not sure the idea itself convinces me, because the older I get, the less I believe in so-called national characteristics and the more I incline to the view of Confucius – "people's natures are alike; it is their habits that drive them far apart". Yes, Scots, or some of them, have "attitude", as several poems suggest; so do Danes and Russians and no doubt so did ancient Babylonians. But because the poets chose their topics, rather than being set them, there is a lot of interest in how each interpreted the aspect they chose.

In fact, over and over, the chosen aspect evokes not so much a place as a place in time and a family member associated with that time: mothers, fathers, grandparents and indeed childhoods haunt these poems. The garment in Mandy Haggith's "Tweed", long gone to some jumble sale, is craved for its connection with a now-dead mother:

     So now, although I hunger to shrug it over my shoulders,
     put my hands into her pockets

This is moving, because most of us have been there and can identify with the situation, but its power, indeed its universality, comes from the lost garment's connection with the lost person: the fact that its fabric was tweed is incidental – habit rather than nature, as Confucius would have it. John Glenday's "The Numbers Stations", allegedly about the Arbroath smokie, in fact uses it as an image in a sombre poem about a childhood of the 50s and 60s, haunted by fears of what used to be called the shadow of the bomb:

    smoke-grey rucks of skin sloughing from his flesh

    and the cured flesh peeling easily from the bone.

Here again, though local references abound, the experience was universal; Anne Berkeley's collection The Men from Praga (Salt 2009) records just such a bomb-haunted 60s childhood at the other end of Britain.

Some poems, of course, do focus more on their particular, nominal subjects. Dawn Wood and Marjorie Lotfi Gill, paired to write about artists Joan Eardley and Eduardo Paolozzi, both enter sensitively into their subjects' ways of working, while Angus Peter Campbell in "William Topaz McGonagall", does a fine job of imitating his subject's cadences without, I'm glad to say, mocking him, for he was a man who deserved better than mockery.

I was glad also to see a concrete poem a la Edwin Morgan – Rebecca Sharp's "The Declaration of Barrbru"- for one problem with this project was that Mr Morgan had already dealt so well with some of these topics that I was hearing his voice instead of those on the page. He needed to echo in this book somewhere. The most interesting poems, perhaps, were those that somehow managed to find an unexpected angle on their subject, and where how something was said became at least as important as what was said. Tracey Herd's gripping little psychodrama "Bible Joanne", Tessa Berring's freewheeling "Caryatid" and Gerry Loose's incantatory "Gruinard Island" are among them.

With this format – different aspects of a nation – there will be both something to please most people, also something that goes over their heads, for generational or other reasons (from the poems where they appear, I gather Orange Juice and Arab Strap must be bands, but frankly they might be Chinese emperors for all I knew). It's a very diverse, lively anthology and very nicely produced. A deil o a broth, as Dilys Rose remarks in "Cullen Skink".

This is an anthology of poems chosen from entries to a competition for poems on "themes relevant to working class life, politics, communities and culture". It was judged by Andy Croft of the publisher Smokestack and Mary Sayer of the Unite union.

Themed anthologies are odd beasts. Their big advantage is that they can appeal to readers who might not normally think poetry had much to say to them, or know where to begin with it – indeed they are, unless totally inept, pretty much sure to appeal to readers who share the anthology's particular interest. This reaching out to an unaccustomed audience is a worthwhile thing to attempt, though whether it succeeds would depend, I suppose, as much on the publisher's promotion skills as on the product. The themed anthology has drawbacks too, and most of them depend on the kind of theme chosen. If the theme is narrow in scope, the poems can be too repetitive and unvarying. This is not a problem here, for the theme is a pretty wide one. If the theme is in any way political, religious or ecological, the tone can soon start to sound preachy, and this is a problem in some poems here.

The one problem I think nearly all themed anthologies have is that, because the criteria for inclusion embrace theme as well as intrinsic merit, the content tends to be of more uneven quality than would be the case in an anthology chosen on poetic skill alone. Again this depends on how wide the potential pool was: there has been enough good poetry written on the theme of, say, the Great War to fill several anthologies. Here, the pool was the 800 competition entries. Going by the late Leslie Norris's estimate that, in competitions he'd judged, about 10% of the entries were in serious contention, this should have yielded about 80 poems of interest. In fact this pamphlet contains 23, and not all of them would make my cut, but then judging does contain some very personal elements.

The best, for my money, are those that approach their subject subtly, from an angle. This might be a metaphor, like football in Helen Burke's "The Match", which depicts its subjects

Stood outside the ground
Most of us.
Trying to get a ticket for our own lives.

Or it might be via a focus on one individual, as in Jim Mainland's "The Carpenter", celebrating the work of Francesco Tuccio of Lampedusa, who makes crosses out of driftwood and wreckage to commemorate refugees who died en route and celebrate those who survive. This poem's vocabulary shimmers with delicate allusion: Tuccio genuinely is a carpenter and the implications of a carpenter who makes crosses cannot be missed, but the reader is not bludgeoned with them. We are trusted to pick up throwaway references to

an ecumenical gathering
of hooks, screws, pins, tacks, staples, rivets, nails

and

gaudy, misshapen, blistered, sea-sucked
wreckage that is already reliquary

until the powerful ending, in which the cross itself turns into an image:

a tree out-branched, upright on the level plain,
a raised hand to haul you from hostile waters.

Steve Pottinger's poem "Glass collector" is another that derives its strength from its focus on an individual, who defies people's preconceptions about him, and from a play on the word "space". Again this succeeds because it is concerned not only to get its theme across but to use words well and memorably – the best way, by far, to get any theme across, if only polemicists would realise it. Could there be a more pointed or economical way to achieve what Owen Gallagher's Glaswegian narrator does in his coinage of "right hoorable" for "right honourable"?

There were several other poems that impressed me in places, though some were, I thought, itching for an editor. A few fell into the category of "carefully observed memories of childhood", a genre I generally find workmanlike rather than exciting, though this may be a personal taste. And a few were just too angry for their own good and ended up sputtering rather than speaking. The introduction mentioned with approval the "passionate" nature of the poems: passion is fine when controlled by intellect and distance, but if passion is allowed to take over a poem, verbal skill tends to take its leave.

I don't think you would need to identify as working-class to find things to like in this anthology, though you'd almost certainly need to be on the left of politics. The feeling of being preached at is there in fewer poems than I had feared it might be, and the best of the poems, about a third of them, are surely worth the modest £5 price-tag. It can be bought here

Another anthology. This is an edited version of a website of the same name, a collection of poems which came into being because of the 2015 general election. The swing to the right, against the predictions of opinion polls, surprised most poets, who, like nearly everyone else, live in an online bubble where we come across few world-views that do not mirror our own. Two poets, the editors of this anthology, decided to publish a poem a day for 100 days in response to the election (it turned into 138 days, but poets aren't usually big on maths). Some were commissioned from poets the editors knew or knew of, others came from open submission. Disclosure: I have a poem in it myself but am taking my usual stance that one poem doesn't disqualify me from reviewing a whole anthology.

It might be argued that commissioning poems from the editors' own online acquaintance would produce homogeneity of views, but apparently the open submissions were no less homogenous (as I know was the case in a later project on poems about Brexit: not a single pro-Brexit poem was submitted). Why there should be this political consensus among poets is a puzzle many have raised. If one accepts that the role of poets in society, rather than to be unacknowledged legislators, is to be gadflies, it seems natural that they should be anti-whatever government is in power, and indeed anti-establishment. But that doesn't wholly explain the leftist consensus. Either right-wing poets, these days, don't exist, or they don't write about politics, or if they do, they avoid projects like this. The introduction, if I've understood it correctly, suggests that right-wingers, being more pragmatic, may not bother with the lyric form as a way of influencing or persuading others, ie for political purposes, because its reach is too small. I'm not sure about this, but then neither am I sure I have the hang of its argument elsewhere, eg "By dividing the work according to the four ministries […] in Nineteen Eighty-Four, we are not just having a dig at the attitudes of the political class […] but also indicating that the opinions expressed in these pages are not without their own ideologies". I don't really see how the second follows from the first (though I thought the idea of the four sections quite a witty way to organise the book) and overall the intro reminds me of an old North Wales man's reply when asked his opinion of the sermons preached by his local vicar, the poet R S Thomas. He said, "He do pitch the hay too high in the crach", meaning the sermons went over his head. Some of this intro's hay is out of my reach, too.

If the poems are largely homogenous in their political stance, they are, thankfully, not at all so in their technique. They range from overtly polemical to very oblique, from free verse to complicated and elaborate forms (both classical and invented), from contemporary to historical parallel, from persona to personal. Some of the form poems particularly impressed me, because the technique turned out, in this instance, to be a way of making the reader think more carefully about the words and their import. I would cite as outstanding Hannah Lowe's use of bold type to create a poem-within-a-poem in "The Garden Is Not For Everyone", Ian McMillan's similar use of italicised unspoken thought in "News From't Northern Province" and Paul McGrane's variant villanelle "The Government" – I seldom warm to villanelles, but this is a perfect example of how to turn the form's repetition and inevitability to account, stressing over and over the unpalatable fact that "somebody voted for the government". There are many other forms represented: sonnets, ballads, ghazal, terza rima, sestina. I'm still trying to work out why Ben Wilkinson, in his lively sestina "Building a Brighter, More Secure Future" chose the indefinite article "a" as one of his keywords. He must have had some purpose in deliberately choosing so weak a word in so strong a place, but so far I'm not getting it; more reading needed…

Another technique that worked very well in some of these poems was mythologizing, which gives a universality and timelessness to what might otherwise be bounded by its own particular time and place. Jon Stone's "Incentivampire" is a splendid, memorable example, as is Tony Williams's terza rima "The Promised Land" (another happy marriage of form and theme, a form and journey both potentially without an end).

I don't think all these poems can have been written specifically for the project, or during the hundred days; some must have been to hand already and simply fitted the brief. For instance, Steve Ely's "Inyenzi", one of the most powerful poems I've read in recent years, was in his pamphlet Werewolf (Calder Valley Poetry, 2016, reviewed here and though the timing would allow for it to have been written for this project, it seems so integral to the pamphlet, so much part of its pattern, that I can't believe it evolved outside it. Not that this matters, because his transfer of the rhetoric used in Rwanda, to dehumanise the Tutsi and justify their killing, to a persona in this country speaking of what's sometimes called the underclass is chilling, masterly and fits the brief perfectly.

Nevertheless
they seemed to find each other attractive
mating continually and without compunction,
Even the juveniles were fertile

There are some poems that seem more tangential to the theme than this. In some cases, like Josephine Dickinson's "Go Not, Gentle", they are less a reaction to a specific event than a way of seeing the world, but still capable of being seen as a response to the theme. It's also possible that many poets preferred to approach the theme in an oblique way rather than risk being overtly polemical. There were a few poems that made me feel preached at, and correspondingly resentful, but not many. Overall, it's an anthology with much energy and passion, as is natural with political poetry, but also with more nuance and subtlety than might have been expected.

Disclaimer: I have a poem in this, but have decided that one poem does not constitute a reason not to review the rest of the anthology.

Well, this is interesting. Last year, I reviewed two individual poetry collections whose main focus was ageing (Philip Gross's Love Songs of Carbon and Tamar Yoseloff's A Formula for Night) and one anthology of poems about ageing – also Scottish, Second Wind: new poems by Douglas Dunn, Vicki Feaver and Diana Hendry, pub. The Saltire Society. Indeed, a few poems from that anthology also cropped up in this one…. So there would seem to be a current fashion for poems on this topic.

Second Wind's remit was specifically to be "creative" about ageing, and judging by Sally Magnusson's foreword to Whatever the Sea, I wouldn't be surprised if this one too had been determined from the start to be basically upbeat rather than depress the customers. Magnusson describes the general tone as "pleasingly bracing". Even in the section entitled "Old Age Blues", the poems rarely get darker than wistful, and there isn't that much Timor Mortis in the final section, entitled "As Time Draws Near". Those who know my Eeyoreish tendencies will not be surprised to learn that the two bleak exceptions in these sections, Helena Nelson's "Blight" and Edwin Muir's "The Way" were among my favourites in the book.

The title, as many will recall, comes from one of the wonderful late poems of Edwin Morgan, "At Eighty", from his last collection Cathures:

Push the boat out, compañeros,
push the boat out, whatever the sea.

Other gems include Elma Mitchell, one of the several mature women poets so encouraged by the much-lamented Harry Chambers of Peterloo Poets. In "Good Old Days", having forensically dissected her body's failings, she ends:

But up here, at the top of the spine, behind the eyes,
Curtained a little but not blind,
Sits a young and laughing mind
Wondering which part of me is telling lies.

This disconnect between physical fact and mental self-image also cries out of Nelson's "Blight", which I can't resist quoting in full:

Each of us is old
and our brave silks begin
to fall from us. Draw close
in the chapterhouse of skin.

How shall we be glad?
We were young, young – we knew
it would happen as it happens
but not like this. Not to

us, not to the silk-sellers,
the bearers of spice and gold.
Our tales were bright in the telling
but this was not foretold.

There are poems in the anthology which are cosier, and which please me less, because they can get perilously close to cheery homespun philosophy. Mostly this consists of the odd clichéd line or phrase in an otherwise interesting poem, but a few poems, like Helen Cruickshank's "Autumn Compensations", seem to be pretty much made up of cottage gardens, slippered feet and irredeemable cosiness. Cruickshank, who could write much better than this, seems to have been left out of the author biogs at the end, which is a shame as hers would have been one of the more interesting ones.

But there is some fine work in here – apart from those I've already mentioned, there is Iain Crichton Smith, always a reflective, thought-provoking joy, Vicki Feaver and Alastair Reid among many others. Plus that chilling, exact Muir poem, which I didn't know before and now can't forget:

Stay here, for ever stay.
None stays here, none.
I cannot find the way.
The way leads on.
Oh places I have passed!
That journey's done.
And what will come at last?
The road leads on.

I'm wondering now when the next anthology on this topic will come up, and what the trend means…

Arising out of a Facebook post by the poet Jo Bell, which linked to a list of poems to try on people who think they hate poetry. I didn't know any of them (US poems mainly, I think) but it did inspire me to try to list the ones I have had success with in this line when doing classes and workshops. I'm thinking especially of those who say they can't get on with contemporary poetry, by which they usually mean the kind that doesn't rhyme.

1, Napoleon, by Miroslav Holub

Holub is a good poet for folk who think they hate poetry, because he's very direct and non-mystifying. He was a doctor, and that vocabulary and subject matter often informs his work, as in Casualty

2. 170 Chinese Poems, translated by Arthur Waley

The "170" was a famous anthology in my youth and I've never actually met anyone who disliked it. Waley was particularly fond of the poet Bai Ju-yi (once known as Po Chu-i) from the 8th-9th century, who specialised in very simple, direct language (which if course wasn't near as simple as it looks). "Remembering Golden Bells" was a poem about the death of his daughter.

3. "Everything Changes" by Bert Brecht.

This is quite a good way to get non-poetry-readers to see what can be done by playing around with syntax, and how it really isn't that difficult or frightening.

4. "Eden Rock" by Charles Causley.

You might say Causley is the compromise for those who can't get on with free verse, since he never abandoned rhyme and music, but "Eden Rock" is half-rhyme, unobtrusive, form used in a twentieth-century way. It's also very powerful and most folk of a certain age can relate to it. There are others on his page in the Poetry Archive.

So at the start of the year I resolved to write two book reviews a month - with one caveat, I also do author interviews, which take more work, so I decided they would also count as review posts. That would mean 24 posts over the year.

Well, I made it. I did three posts in November, two reviews plus an interview, so the one December review makes up the 24. They can all be found by hitting the tags "book reviews" and "interviews with writers" in the sidebar on the left.

For those who like statistics, the 21 books reviewed included 3 anthologies, all poetry, and 18 single-authored books. Of these, 8 were prose and 10 poetry, while 11 were by women and 7 by men. Nearly all were contemporary or near-contemporary. I included a review of the short stories of Ismat Chughtai because I'd never come across her before and thought others might not have done. Elizabeth Melville isn't contemporary either, but the selection of her work by Jamie Reid Baxter was reasonably so, and I'd been hugely impressed by it at Stanza. Of the three author interviews, two were with women (Barbara Marsh and Catherine Fisher) and one with a man (Steve Ely).

Most of the authors aren't the mega-famous type, since they get lots of reviews anyway. I did review a Louise Glück, because the reviews I'd seen didn't, to my mind, quite get to grips with one aspect of it. There was no non-fiction, which is unusual for me. But the stress on poetry was deliberate: I began doing this because writers, particularly poets are always complaining that there isn't enough of a reviewing culture and it seemed reasonable to try to actually do something about it rather than just whinge. Since I chose most of the books, it figures that the reviews are mostly positive, though I hope still critically aware. If I don't like something about a book, I'll say so. I shall keep on reviewing next year, though I won't set targets, but will still hope to do one or two a month.

This is a short anthology of poems, commissioned from the three poets, on the theme of ageing. I bought it both because I'd read and enjoyed the work of all three before and because it's a theme becoming somewhat relevant and fascinating to me. Indeed in the last two months I have read two individual collections, by Philip Gross and Tamar Yoseloff, centring on this very theme. Each poet's work in this collection is prefaced by a short note on how they worked, which is interesting though it left me slightly puzzled. Vicki Feaver says "The poems were written in solitude. But meeting with Douglas Dunn and Diana Hendry and sharing poems and ideas gave me the encouragement I thrive on". Diana Hendry, on the other hand, speaks of "meeting, talking about and workshopping poems", which suggests rather more collaboration. Her note also mentions that the topic they were given was, specifically, "Creative Ageing", and the editorial note indicates that the brief was to "challenge the orthodoxies surrounding ageing".

I can imagine why the commission may have harped on the positive, because one obvious pitfall of this theme is that it may produce something quite morbid and depressing. But pitfalls in poetry almost always come in pairs, and while avoiding this particular Charybdis, it is possible to veer into a Scylla of relentless chirpiness. I think this is why the Dunn poems, of which I'd been expecting the most, having long loved his work, partly disappointed me. The first poem, "Thursday", is just plain not very good. Lines like

If only I could tap my old exuberance,
High spirits that I plied in days of yore;
Then maybe I would find a kind deliverance
From the curse of being such a bloody bore

may be meant as amusing (I didn't find them so, but we old grouches are hard to amuse). But it sounds just like Clive James versifying, and Dunn is so much better than that. The next couple of poems are better, but keep coming up with slick one-liners like "one chirrup absent from the dawn chorus" and "So fall off a barstool swigging your hemlock" ("The Wash") that begin to sound like a desperate determination to make a joke of everything. In his prefatory note, he mentions that he re-read that unbearably poignant scene on ageing from Henry IV Part 2: "we have heard the chimes at midnight", but found no inspiration there. I suppose it wasn't jaunty enough.

Luckily the very next poem, "Wondrous Strange", shows Dunn back at his best, not trying to come up with easy answers to what is by nature elusive:

Now it can almost be heard. But not quite
Almost. Still on the far side of nearly,
It is the melody of a floating feather.

There are some memorable poems after this, notably "Curmudgeon", with a genuinely funny and observant one-liner, "he is a virtuoso concert pessimist", that leaves the rest standing, and "The Glove Compartment", which doesn't try to mitigate loss and mortality with flippancy and is starkly moving.

Most of the Dunn poems are set in the now of ageing; Vicki Feaver, quite often, comes at the theme through memory, looking back to a youth that has departed. She is

travelling forwards at time's pace
and backwards and forwards
at the mind's speeds ("Travelling").

There are several luminous remembered moments –pomegranate juice, dressing-up boxes – and a tendency to reinterpret, revalue in the light of age what is seen and experienced, like her reaction to the ageing, drying fruit in "Clementines". I think it's arguable that there are, in modern poetry, not just in this collection, too many "I remember" poems and that it's a theme which can become predictable, but it is very well done here. The most memorable poem, to me, was "The Blue Wave", in which she comes closest of the three to the "creative ageing" brief in celebrating a painter:

But in my head there's a painting
done in your nineties
when just to lift your arm

was an effort: a single brave
upwards sweep with a wide
distemper brush so loaded

with paint the canvas filled
with the glistening blue wall
of a wave before it falls.

One of those images that does in a moment the work of a paragraph.

Diana Hendry's selection is mighty unpredictable. We go from memories-of-childhood poems to coming-to-terms-with-the-present poems and (my favourites), ones which veer unexpectedly off at right-angles to reality, like that iconic oldie Cpl Jones going into the realms of fantasy. She takes risks, which means that not all of them will come off – I don't think "Meditation on an Old Bear" really rises above doggerel, and in "An Alternative Retirement" I find her praise of the Hatton Garden jewel thieves, or as she calls them "the glamorous gang riding off with the loot", plain annoying: a thug on a pension is still a thug, not a role model.

But other risks come off rather beautifully. "Autobiography" with its ballad rhythm has an air of Causley

And what d'you remember of fear, child?

Long grass, bare feet, imagined snakes.
Dark slid a lid across the day.

And "Beyond" is probably my favourite poem in the collection. Its syntax and lineation are freed-up, unconventional in a way no other poem in an otherwise completely conventionally-justified book is, and the thought-line is to match.

What is it about the need for it? The why
of flight mountaineering the gift of grace. How dire

if ours was the only galaxy!

How happily the word sits in the mouth, satisfying
as a communion wafer.

This is the sound of the distant train
running through your dream--

be-yond be-yond be-yond be-yond.

I found this an uneven anthology, but its best poems, notably "Beyond", "The Blue Wave" and "The Glove Compartment" make it well worth the modest £7 cover price.

I've been thinking an awful lot about poetry anthologies lately, mainly because I've been reading an awful lot about poetry anthologies - I've heard, over the past year and especially the past few months, of umpteen coming out (even been invited to be in some). I thought at first it might be to do with the imminence of Christmas, since they make popular gifts, but I think it's more than that. The poet Jon Stone suggested on a Facebook thread that publishers found them more saleable than, for example, first collections by relative unknowns, and I think there's some truth in that, though I also think the very existence of Facebook is part of it - suddenly it has become a whole lot easier for an editor thinking of putting an anthology together to contact a large number of poets at once.

Anthologies of writing, prose as well as poetry, have always been an easy way in, a way to find writers you might not have known about and get a taste of their work so that you can then go on to read individual collections by those who please or interest you. In this respect they're very useful. Some, especially those on specific themes, have more permanent uses. They can show poets reacting differently over time to the same theme, like John Greening's "Accompanied Voices" about poetic reactions to musicians. Or they can show the reactions of different sectors of society - classes, genders - to the same event, like Tim Kendall's "Poetry of the First World War". Some showcase particular schools, which is handy for those who think in terms of schools, though to my mind the most interesting poets will never fit into one. An increasing number are "instant reaction" anthologies, got up in a hurry to promote some cause or protest at some wrong. These are by no means always poor: it depends on the editor's judgment and on how thoroughly, or hastily, the job is done, and "For Rhino in a Shrinking World", to take one example, is excellent. But I have read some I admired a lot less.

Ones that are purely time-based - Poetry of the Forties, Best of 2015 sort of titles - are, to my mind, only useful in the first sense, i.e. they give you a taste of many poets, allowing you then to choose the ones into whom you want to go more deeply. These anthologies are, if you like, the baby stage of reading poetry and I don't mean that as an insult, we all have to go through it. What worries me a little about the current plethora of anthologies is that I wonder if many readers are not getting beyond it at all, never delving deeper into one poet. I think this matters because, despite the critics' constant admonition that a poem should be able to "stand alone", one can actually often get a lot more out of seeing it in the context of a writer's other work. Motifs emerge and develop, as they do in music, becoming more haunting each time you encounter them. In a sense, when I read Louise Glück's latest, I am also re-reading The Wild Iris, Meadowlands, Averno and all the rest (and who wouldn't want to?). Poetry is genuinely more rewarding when one has more than a passing acquaintance with someone's work as a whole.

My other worry is in case more and more anthologies should lead to fewer and fewer first collections. Publishers only have a certain number of slots per year. I foresee many new poets who are well known in magazines and anthologies but who cannot for the life of them get a whole collection published. I don't actually want to read an anthology, note poets I should like to know more of, and then find there is no way of doing so, nothing behind the tempting facades, as if I'd stopped off in a promising tourist spot and found it a Potemkin village.

Declaration of interest: I have a poem in this, but it's just the one and it seems a bit OTT not to review a whole anthology on that account.

Poems about pictures are ekphrasis, but according to its definition, this can't be used for poems about music; in fact I don't know that there is a name for them. Nevertheless, they clearly have a lot in common with ekphrastic poems, in that they try to express in one art form the effect produced by another. At least, some do. As the interesting introduction points out, some engage with the music, others with the composer's life, others still with the relevance of the music to the writer's own life (poets do have a tendency to look at the world and make it all about them).

I listened to a lot of classical music when younger, then drifted away from it and haven't really listened to any for decades, which means that the more recent composers who serve as inspiration here, I have neither heard, nor, in some cases, heard of. I don't think this disqualifies me from reviewing the book, because a poem must work as a poem, not merely as a homage, and something should still come through to a non-expert. It does mean that those poems which engage with some aspect of the composer's life are liable to make a more immediate impact on me. "Buxtehude's Daughter" (Alistair Elliot), patiently waiting for one of her organist father's assistants to secure the reversion of his job by marrying her, was an old friend from biographies of Handel; he didn't marry her, but another organist did. This poem, narrated in the lady's voice, is not really about music, but about someone on its fringes who might have become bitter but was actually rather good at making the best of things. Elliot brings her alive by catching a very down-to-earth, unremarkable but engaging voice:

When Handel came, he found me elderly.
He was eighteen and I was twenty-eight -
The sad arithmetic of too soon, too late…
I wonder if he ever thinks of me
At night, in London. He liked my soup that day.
Strange to know someone famous far away.

Since I've a passion for biography and history, it may be inevitable that the narrative and anecdotal poems, which don't really need to be about composers as such, appeal to me most. There is a danger, of course, that such poems become too purely narrative, too "this happened and then that", as, for me, is the case with Mick Imlah's "Scottish Play" (which is more about Kathleen Ferrier than Gluck). But many find the universal in the particular. John Greening's own wry little poem "Field", about a composer who apparently had the ill-luck to invent the nocturne only to be eclipsed in the form by Chopin, is something any artist, in any field, could relate to. With those poems that are less about the composer than about his effect on, or parallel with, the poet's own life, success depends, again, on how far they transcend the personal. Lotte Kramer's "Fugue", with a killer ending I won't spoil by quoting, is "personal" yet also universal, a grim and brilliant reminder that being able to appreciate Great Music does not necessarily make one a better person.

Indeed one danger of this kind of poem, and it happens also in ekphrastic poems, is that of undue reverence toward the subject. I hear it in Ronald Duncan's "Lament for Ben" and occasionally elsewhere. Alistair Elliot and Oliver Reynolds are particularly welcome for their avoidance of it, as is the knockabout humour of Heath-Stubbs's Audenesque ballad on Salieri. And James Reeves's "Knew the Master", alone in the anthology, articulates the way reverence for "the classics", in any art form, can stifle new work by denying it an audience.

It's impossible to do full justice, in a review, to an anthology with 180-odd pages of poems. One observation: quoting numbers in a poem does not often make for memorable lines, even if they do have the letter K in front of them – better to put it in an epigraph, as Anne Stevenson does. Stand-out poems for me included Andrew Motion's "Rhapsody"; I'd never heard of Butterworth but who could resist the idea of a man filmed morris-dancing in 1913, a recording still accessible on YouTube though the man himself died three years later on the Somme?

One very interesting thing Greening notes in his introduction: there were very few poems about composers written before the twentieth century. I would guess it's the same with ekphrastic poems, and would love to know why, suddenly, artists started writing about other artists in this way. It goes further than figuring the poet as composer, too. For Douglas Dunn, the music of Bach "restates the rhythms of a loch" and becomes itself a landscape ("Loch Music"). Charles Tomlinson reinvents Bach as a bee-keeper "topping up the cells/with the honey of C major" ("If Bach had been a Beekeeper"), while Tony Roberts, in "Barkbröd", has his narrator seeing Sibelius through the medium of cheese… Jo Shapcott, in her poem about a Schoenberg orchestration of a Bach piece, pertinently asks "Where does it come from, this passion/for layers?" Where indeed, and why now: why is the present day so obsessed with "seeing" one thing through the medium of another? It's a fascinating question, raised by an unexpectedly eclectic anthology; it may be on one subject but the poems couldn't be more varied.

I have a poem in a new anthology of poems inspired by popular culture, Double Bill, ed. Andy Jackson, pub. Red Squirrel Press. It has poems by a great many different poets, on subjects from Frank Sinatra to Bagpuss - mine, which is called "Oral English", is about Julian & Sandy from Round the Horne and was inspired by an anecdote of Barry Took's about a puzzled letter he once received from a Japanese gentleman who was trying to improve his colloquial English with the aid of The Bona Book of Julian and Sandy. His letter went as follows: Ichigoro Yuchida to Barry Took: "Dear Sir, I am reading with an teacher, The Bona Book of Julian And Sandy. Mainly for the purposes of picking up slangs and very colloquial expressions. My English teacher is well trained in the job, and quite able in every way as a language teacher. Yet he still has some difficulty handling the queer and funny languages, brimming over the pages. I should be more than happy if you would kindly answer the following questions and let me know what they mean in plainer language. One, naff is it, page 25. Two, he's got the polari off hasn’t he. Three, but did you manage to drag yourself up on deck, page 27. I am sorry but I can't see what Mister Horne meant. Sincerely yours, Ichigoro Yuchida..." Took replied, with urbane courtesy, and a correspondence ensued.

You can buy Double Bill here or here. And here's the poem:
Oral English

Ichigoro Yuchida, keen to improve
his colloquial English, puzzles over

a text with his (equally baffled) teacher.
They can't seem to find dolly old eek

in the phrasebook. And why, during a shipwreck,
should Mr Horne laugh when our heroes

drag themselves up on deck? So many queries…
in the end, they think best to seek wisdom

from the writer, which is how they come,
courtesy of Mr Took, to knowledge

of some comic stereotypes, a secret language,
a national habit of wryness, a way of talking

as if one could make a joke of anything,
of code, of hiding from the law, of love.

This is a very scholarly, thorough anthology by a man who knows his subject unusually well, as any regular reader of his blog "War Poets" will be aware. The introductory notes to each poet, and the notes on poems at the back, are very full and informative; the chronology of the war years is helpful and though there's no index of poets, it can be argued that this is not really necessary; there aren't that many represented and the table of contents suffices.

This is because, as Kendall states in the introduction, he has concentrated on the "most important" poets who come within his remit of "poetry related to the War by poets from Britain and Ireland who lived through part or all of it". ("Most important", of course, is a judgement open to debate, but we'll come to that later.) This is almost the polar opposite of the approach taken by Vivien Noakes's "Voices of Silence" anthology, which concentrated on lesser-known voices to give a wider overview of the response to the war than might emerge from the well-known Sassoon-Owen-Rosenberg axis. Nonetheless the two have some principles in common. Noakes's anthology included several women; Kendall's prioritising of poetic quality does not, commendably, lead him to ignore, as some anthologists have done, the contribution of female poets who did after all live through the war as much as men did (indeed sometimes serving as nurses at the front) and whose take on it is both equally relevant and, in several cases, badly underrated by critics.

The real difference between the two seems to me that Noakes is primarily interested in what poetry of the time reveals about people's experience of, and response to, the war, while Kendall is more concerned with what effect the war had on English poetry. In this respect the context-setting in his introduction about how "Georgian" poetry is now viewed, and what it was actually like, is immensely interesting and informative. I had no idea, for instance, how commercially successful and popular the movement was; the first two of the five Georgian anthologies (pub. 1912 and 1915) sold, respectively, 15,000 and 19,000 copies (while The Waste Land was taking 18 months to shift a print run of 443). By the way, for all Ivor Gurney's throwaway remark, noted in the introduction, that the Germans had no poets of note, the soldiers he was fighting did, if he had but known it, share similar enthusiasms; the poetic hit of 1913 in Germany had been Stefan George's "Der Stern des Bundes" (Star of the Covenant) and many German soldiers went into battle with it in their breast pockets.

There aren't many actual surprises among the poets or poems chosen; the major one, perhaps, being Robert Service, who like A A Milne could switch from comic to serious mode when he had to. The omissions, of course, are more problematic, as always in an anthology, and where space is at a premium I would maybe quibble with the inclusion of Sassoon's "Glory of Women", which, apart from being, as the introduction rightly says, misogynistic in the extreme, just doesn't strike me as a very good poem. The other inclusion I'm not sure about is the short selection of anonymous wartime songs at the end. That sort of thing fitted in the Noakes anthology for obvious reasons; I'm not sure it does here, and without these songs, Kendall might have found space for some of his more regretted omissions, notably Gilbert Frankau. I don't want to play the game of "who should have been in it", because no anthology can satisfy all comers, but I do think that even by Kendall's criterion of poetic excellence, Frankau ought to be there. If not in the very front rank of talent, he is not far behind, and because his take on the war was not quite that of Owen & Co, he has been often overlooked. He gives a different slant, which is why Kendall finds it necessary to quote him in the introduction.

Nonetheless, this is a thoroughly well produced anthology of powerful and fascinating poems. It's far more useful than some earlier anthologies that managed to be completely blind to the presence of female poets, and it also finds space for some longer poems, where many anthologies, from this or any other period, would leave you with the impression that nothing but brief lyrics was ever written. It also happens to be a most handsome hardback volume, with endpapers and a sewn-in bookmark and at a very reasonable price, but that's secondary. To me it perfectly complements my Noakes anthology: the other side of the coin, so to speak, and the introduction in particular is hugely informative.

Review of For Rhino in a Shrinking World, ed. Harry Owen, illustrated by Sally Scott, pub. The Poets Printery, South Africa, 2013
rhino

For Rhino in a Shrinking World is an international anthology of poems and illustrations produced to raise awareness of the endangerment of rhino through poaching and to support the work of protecting them. All contributors have donated their work, and all proceeds go to the Chipembere Rhino Foundation.

Harry Owen began the project out of shock at the brutality of this trade, but, very sensibly, the book does not harp on horror; it is described in the introduction but gruesome facts are pretty much confined there, so as not to exclude the many concerned people who simply can't handle seeing such things illustrated or spoken of explicitly. If you're among them, you can read this book without fear of nightmares.

Not all the poems specifically concern rhino; some are more generally related to issues of conservation and despoliation. All have a cause in mind, though, and I wouldn't claim that all manage to completely avoid the great pitfall of polemic, namely being too obvious and approaching the reader with a linguistic club rather than a rapier. But this doesn't happen nearly as often as it might, and there are in fact many fine examples of how to get ideas across subtly, from Harry Owen's own poem "Your Tour Guide Speaks", where future tourists at the "Serengeti Roadshow" are invited to admire "elefords", "catillacs" and "audilope" rather than the real thing, through Marc Vincenz's "Crushed Dragon Bones", which dares to describe neutrally and leave all judgement to the reader, to Philip Neilsen's "The Dead Are Bored", a textbook example of how to write straight polemic and make it work by not forgetting to pay attention to rhythms and language.

For a European reader, a great bonus is hearing non-European voices describing unfamiliar landscapes – Amali Rodrigo swimming with seals is especially memorable, but Adam Tavel, Mxousi Nyezwa and several others transport us effortlessly across the world to great effect.

Poems that would impress in any company include Marc Vincenz's "Supermolecular", catching the rhythms, momentum and soundtrack of a whole natural world, Susan Richardson's "You'll never become a rhinoceros", getting inside another skin as well as Les Murray could, and my own favourite, Tony Williams' "Dear Rhino, Love from Hippo", a tour-de-force of language, imagery, humour and empathy with three species at once:

In the past month

I have eaten a rare fly, a wristwatch
a silhouette, odd chunks of my rivals' chins
and a vast tonnage of hay which you,

dense hoover of the midday sun, missed

when the eternal salad drawer of the night
clanked open as you slept.

Anyone could enjoy this book for the poems and the illustrations, but you can also have the happy consciousness of helping to protect a harmless and remarkable beast if you go to this page now. It's a most handsome, well-produced volume, no more expensive than you'd expect for an illustrated book, and anyhow, think where the money's going…

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Review of Fire: Brigid and the Sacred Feminine, eds Shauna Gilligan & Niamh Boyce, Arlen House 2024
Review of A Bird Called Elaeus, by David Constantine, pub. Bloodaxe 2024
Review of My Pen is The Wing of a Bird: New Fiction by Afghan Women, pub. MacLehose Press 2022
Review of We’re All In It Together, eds Michael Stewart, Steve Ely, Kayleigh Campbell, Grist 2022
Review of Where the Birds Sing Our Names ed. Tony Curtis, pub. Seren 2021
Review of “100 Poets: A Little Anthology” ed. John Carey, pub. Yale University Press 2021
Review of “100 Poems To Save the Earth” eds Zoe Brigley and Kristian Evans, Seren 2021
Review of Almarks: Radical Poetry From Shetland
Review of Scotia Extremis, eds Andy Jackson and Brian Johnstone, pub. Luath Press
Review of We Will Be Free! The Bread & Roses Poetry Award Anthology 2018 Ed Mike Quille,
Review of New Boots and Pantisocracies; eds W N Herbert and Andy Jackson, pub. Smokestack Books 2016
Review of "Whatever the Sea: Scottish Poems for Growing Older" ed. Lizzie MacGregor pub Polygon 2016
Poems for Poetry-Haters
The Year of 21 Reviews and Three Interviews
Review of Second Wind: new poems by Douglas Dunn, Vicki Feaver and Diana Hendry, pub. The Saltire So
Potemkin Anthologies
Review of Accompanied Voices: Poets on Composers, ed John Greening, pub. Boydell Press.
Double Bill anthology
Review of "Poetry of the First World War", ed. Tim Kendall. pub. OUP
Dense hoover of the midday sun: review of For Rhino in a Shrinking World

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Sheenagh Pugh's writing blog

Entries tagged with anthologies

Review of Fire: Brigid and the Sacred Feminine, eds Shauna Gilligan & Niamh Boyce, Arlen House 2024

Review of A Bird Called Elaeus, by David Constantine, pub. Bloodaxe 2024

Review of My Pen is The Wing of a Bird: New Fiction by Afghan Women, pub. MacLehose Press 2022

Review of We’re All In It Together, eds Michael Stewart, Steve Ely, Kayleigh Campbell, Grist 2022

Review of Where the Birds Sing Our Names ed. Tony Curtis, pub. Seren 2021

Review of “100 Poets: A Little Anthology” ed. John Carey, pub. Yale University Press 2021

Review of “100 Poems To Save the Earth” eds Zoe Brigley and Kristian Evans, Seren 2021

Review of Almarks: Radical Poetry From Shetland

Review of Scotia Extremis, eds Andy Jackson and Brian Johnstone, pub. Luath Press

Review of We Will Be Free! The Bread & Roses Poetry Award Anthology 2018 Ed Mike Quille,

Review of New Boots and Pantisocracies; eds W N Herbert and Andy Jackson, pub. Smokestack Books 2016

Review of "Whatever the Sea: Scottish Poems for Growing Older" ed. Lizzie MacGregor pub Polygon 2016

Poems for Poetry-Haters

The Year of 21 Reviews and Three Interviews

Review of Second Wind: new poems by Douglas Dunn, Vicki Feaver and Diana Hendry, pub. The Saltire So

Potemkin Anthologies

Review of Accompanied Voices: Poets on Composers, ed John Greening, pub. Boydell Press.

Double Bill anthology

Review of "Poetry of the First World War", ed. Tim Kendall. pub. OUP

Dense hoover of the midday sun: review of For Rhino in a Shrinking World