Being Alive: the sequel to Staying Alive

By Neil Astley

Being Alive is the sequel to Neil Astley’s Staying Alive, which became Britain’s most popular poetry book because it gave readers hundreds of thoughtful and passionate poems about living in the modern world. Now he has assembled this equally lively companion 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.

Staying Alive didn’t just reach a broader readership, it introduced thousands of new readers to contemporary poetry, giving them an international gathering of poems of great personal force, poems with emotional power, intellectual edge and playful wit. It also brought many readers back to poetry, people who hadn’t read poetry for years because it hadn’t held their interest. Being Alive gives readers an even wider selection of vivid, brilliantly diverse contemporary poetry from around the world. A companion anthology, Being Human (2011), completed this poetry trilogy. Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy (2012) selects 100 poems from all three anthologies, a third from each. These anthologies have been welcomed not only by poets but by a wide range of well-known people respected for their work in fields other than poetry – all avid readers of poetry. They want to recommend these books above all other anthologies of contemporary poetry.

'I love Staying Alive and keep going back to it. Being Alive is just as vivid, strongly present and equally beautifully organised. But this new book feels even more alive – I think it has a heartbeat, or maybe that’s my own thrum humming along with the music of these poets. Sitting alone in a room with these poems is to be assured that you are not alone, you are not crazy (or if you are, you’re not the only one who thinks this way!) I run home to this book to argue with it, find solace in it, to locate myself in the world again.' – Meryl Streep

‘Truly startling and powerful poems.’ – Mia Farrow

‘These poems distil the human heart as nothing else… Staying Alive celebrates the point of poetry. It’s invigorating and makes me proud of being human.’ – Jane Campion

‘Staying Alive is a blessing of a book. The title says it all. I have long waited for just this kind of setting down of poems. Has there ever been such a passionate anthology? These are poems that hunt you down with the solace of their recognition.’ – Anne Michaels

‘Staying Alive is a magnificent anthology. The last time I was so excited, engaged and enthralled by a collection of poems was when I first encountered The Rattle Bag. I can’t think of any other anthology that casts its net so widely, or one that has introduced me to so many vivid and memorable poems.’ – Philip Pullman

‘Usually if you say a book is “inspirational” that means it’s New Agey and soft at the center. This astonishingly rich anthology, by contrast, shows that what is edgy, authentic and provocative can also awaken the spirit and make its readers quick with consciousness. In these pages I discovered many new writers, and I’ve decided I’m now in love with our troublesome epoch if it can produce poems of such genius.’ – Edmund White

‘Staying Alive is a wonderful testament to Neil Astley’s lifetime in poetry, and to the range and courage of his taste. It’s also, of course, a testament to poetry itself: to its powers to engross and move us, to its ability to challenge and brace us, and to its exultation. Everyone who cares about poetry should own this book.’ – Andrew Motion

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Sep 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781780371771

Neil Astley

Neil Astley is the editor of Bloodaxe Books which he founded in 1978. His books include many anthologies, most notably those in the Staying Alive series: Staying Alive (2002), Being Alive (2004), Being Human (2011) and Staying Human (2020), along with three collaborations with Pamela Robertson-Pearce, Soul Food and the DVD-books In Person: 30 Poets and In Person: World Poets. He received an Eric Gregory Award for his poetry, and has published two poetry collections, Darwin Survivor and Biting My Tongue, as well as two novels, The End of My Tether (shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award), and The Sheep Who Changed the World. He was given a D.Litt from Newcastle University for his work with Bloodaxe Books in 1995; is a patron and past trustee of Ledbury Poetry Festival; and was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018. He lives in the Tarset valley in Northumberland.

Book preview

BEING ALIVE

the sequel to Staying Alive

Edited by Neil Astley

Being Alive is the sequel to Neil Astley’s Staying Alive, which became Britain’s most popular poetry book because it gave readers hundreds of thoughtful and passionate poems about living in the modern world. Now he has assembled this equally lively companion 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.

Staying Alive introduced thousands of new readers to contemporary poetry, offering an international gathering of poems of great personal force, poems with emotional power, intellectual edge and playful wit. It brought many other readers back to poetry, people who hadn’t read poetry for years because it hadn’t held their interest. Being Alive gives readers an even wider selection of vivid, brilliantly diverse contemporary poetry from around the world. A third companion anthology, Being Human, completes this modern poetry trilogy.

‘I love Staying Alive and keep going back to it. Being Alive is just as vivid, strongly present and equally beautifully organised. But this new book feels even more alive – I think it has a heartbeat, or maybe that’s my own thrum humming along with the music of these poets. Sitting alone in a room with these poems is to be assured that you are not alone, you are not crazy (or if you are, you’re not the only one who thinks this way!) I run home to this book to argue with it, find solace in it, to locate myself in the world again.’ – Meryl Streep

‘These poems remind us of what we have felt yet never fully articulated, what we have dreamt yet never believed entirely possible. Perhaps most importantly, the poems in here tell us there is nothing more powerful than language when its agenda is to reveal rather than to conceal or distort.’ – Kamila Shamsie

‘Hopefully, books like this will put poetry back into the mainstream.’ – Van Morrison

Cover photograph © Laura Doss | www.corbisimages.com

Responses to Staying Alive:

‘Truly startling and powerful poems.’ – Mia Farrow

‘These poems distil the human heart as nothing else… Staying Alive celebrates the point of poetry. It’s invigorating and makes me proud of being human.’ – Jane Campion

‘Staying Alive is a blessing of a book. The title says it all. I have long waited for just this kind of setting down of poems. Has there ever been such a passionate anthology? These are poems that hunt you down with the solace of their recognition.’ – Anne Michaels

‘Staying Alive is a magnificent anthology. The last time I was so excited, engaged and enthralled by a collection of poems was when I first encountered The Rattle Bag. I can’t think of any other anthology that casts its net so widely, or one that has introduced me to so many vivid and memorable poems.’ – Philip Pullman

‘Usually if you say a book is inspirational that means it’s New Agey and soft at the center. This astonishingly rich anthology, by contrast, shows that what is edgy, authentic and provocative can also awaken the spirit and make its readers quick with consciousness. In these pages I discovered many new writers, and I’ve decided I’m now in love with our troublesome epoch if it can produce poems of such genius.’ – Edmund White

‘A vibrant, brilliantly diverse anthology of poems to delight the mind, heart and soul. A book for people who know they love poetry, and for people who think they don’t.’ – Helen Dunmore

‘Staying Alive is a wonderful testament to Neil Astley’s lifetime in poetry, and to the range and courage of his taste. It’s also, of course, a testament to poetry itself: to its powers to engross and move us, to its ability to challenge and brace us, and to its exultation. Everyone who cares about poetry should own this book.’ – Andrew Motion

‘This is a book to make you fall in love with poetry…Go out and buy it for everyone you love.’ – Christina Patterson, Independent

BEING ALIVE

the sequel to Staying Alive

edited by

NEIL ASTLEY

CONTENTS

Title Page

Neil Astley Introduction

1  Exploring the World

Elma Mitchell This Poem…

Gerald Locklin The Iceberg Theory

Billy Collins Introduction to Poetry

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin The Horses of Meaning

Paul Muldoon Symposium

Simon Armitage Not the Furniture Game

Vincent Woods A Song of Lies

Philip Gross Mappa Mundi

Donald Hall The Poem

Galway Kinnell Saint Francis and the Sow

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill Celebration

Elizabeth Bishop At the Fishhouses

Stewart Conn Tremors

Theodore Roethke Night Journey

Randall Jarrell The Orient Express

C.P. Cavafy Ithaka

Sheenagh Pugh What If This Road

Philip Larkin Poetry of Departures

Derek Mahon The Last of the Fire Kings

Matthew Sweeney The Appointment

Derek Mahon The Mayo Tao

Michael Longley Echoes

Hayden Carruth No Matter What, After All and That Beautiful Word So

Mark Doty Migratory

Don McKay Close-up on a Sharp-shinned Hawk

Lorna Crozier Inventing the Hawk

George Mackay Brown The Hawk

Robert Adamson The southern skua

2  Taste and See

Philip Levine The Simple Truth

David Budbill The First Green of Spring

Denise Levertov O Taste and See

Li-Young Lee From Blossoms

Peter Davison Peaches

Galway Kinnell Blackberry Eating

Sylvia Plath Blackberrying

Tony Harrison A Kumquat for John Keats

Vicki Feaver Crab Apple Jelly

Jacob Polley A Jar of Honey

Pablo Neruda Sweetness, Always

Kim Addonizio For Desire

Helen Dunmore Wild strawberries

Pablo Neruda Horses

Ted Hughes The Horses

Henry Shukman Horses at Christmas

Katrina Porteous Calf

Mary Oliver How Everything Adores Being Alive

Alden Nowlan In Praise of the Great Bull Walrus

Henri Cole Cleaning the Elephant

Alden Nowlan The Bull Moose

Elizabeth Bishop The Fish

Wendell Berry The Peace of Wild Things

Czesław Miłosz Gift

Jane Hirshfield Not-Yet

Andrew Greig A Pre-Breakfast Rant

Chase Twichell Hunger for Something

Ruth L. Schwartz Talking to God on the Seventh Day

Jack Gilbert Hunger

Gwendolyn MacEwen Dark Pines Under Water

Erin Mouré Toxicity

P.K. Page Planet Earth

Wisława Szymborska The Ball

Anne Michaels The Passionate World

Sarah Lindsay World Truffle

Archibald MacLeish You, Andrew Marvell

Mary Oliver Look and See

Agha Shahid Ali Stationery

Michael Donaghy The Present

Imtiaz Dharker Blessing

Robert Creeley The Rain

Naomi Shihab Nye So Much Happiness

Jane Kenyon Happiness

Robert Bly The Third Body

Czesław Miłosz On Pilgrimage

Mary Oliver The Summer Day

Carl Dennis The God Who Loves You

James K. Baxter The Ikons

Czesław Miłosz Veni Creator

Carl Sandburg Prayers of Steel

Antonio Machado ‘Last night while I was sleeping’

Elizabeth Smither Mission Impossible

R.S. Thomas

FROM

Counterpoint

Dennis O’Driscoll Missing God

Charles Causley The Forest of Tangle

Fiona Farrell Credo

Aidan Rooney-Céspedes Retro Creation

Kaylin Haught God Says Yes to Me

Kerry Hardie Sheep Fair Day

Ruth L. Schwartz Oh God, Fuck Me

3  Family

Jacob Polley Smoke

Marge Piercy The watch

Lucille Clifton the lost baby poem

Jeni Couzyn Heartsong

Helen Dunmore Scan at 8 weeks

Kona Macphee Ultrasound at 13 weeks

Paul Muldoon The Sonogram

Pauline Stainer The Ringing Chamber

Victoria Redel Ninth Month

Derek Mahon An Unborn Child

Louis MacNeice Prayer Before Birth

Pablo Neruda Births

Kona Macphee The night before the last day of January

Kate Clanchy Driving to the Hospital

W.N. Herbert The Harvest in March

Matthew Hollis And let us say

Lauris Edmond Tempo

Fleur Adcock Counting

Kate Clanchy Love

Sylvia Plath Morning Song

Richard Murphy Natural Son

Thom Gunn Baby Song

Helen Farish Newly Born Twins

Sharon Olds My First Weeks

Kathleen Ossip Nursling

Anne Stevenson The Victory

Kate Clanchy Stance

Jane Hirshfield Red Onion, Cherries, Boiling Potatoes, Milk –

Anne Winters

FROM

Elizabeth Near and Far

Fleur Adcock For Andrew

Gabriela Mistral Let Him Not Grow Up

Rita Dove Daystar

Anna Jackson The peacock of motherhood

Connie Bensley Single Parent

Michael Ondaatje Bearhug

Nick Flynn Cartoon Physics, part 1

Michael Laskey A Tray of Eggs

Thomas Lynch Skating with Heather Grace

Tony Hoagland Benevolence

Carlos Drummond de Andrade Infancy

Anne Stevenson The Mother

Seamus Heaney Sunlight

Philip Levine Starlight

Seamus Heaney

FROM

Clearances

Yehuda Amichai My Father

Sinéad Morrissey Genetics

Seamus Heaney Digging

Brendan Kennelly I See You Dancing, Father

Theodore Roethke Papa’s Waltz

Susan Wicks My Father Is Shrinking

Li-Young Lee Little Father

Hart Crane My Grandmother’s Love Letters

Andrew Waterhouse Climbing My Grandfather

Thomas Lynch Custody

Julia Copus Second Home

Marie Howe How Many Times

Kona Macphee No fairy story

Selima Hill House

Ai The Cockfighter’s Daughter

Sylvia Plath Daddy

Sharon Olds Waste Sonata

Tracey Herd The Survivors

Pascale Petit The Strait-Jackets

Pascale Petit Self-Portrait as a Warao Violin

Susan Glickman But till that morning, ain’t no one gonna harm you

John Steffler Hollis Street Square, Halifax

Gjertrud Schnackenberg Returning North

Maurice Riordan Time Out

Helen Dunmore The blessing

C. Day Lewis Walking Away

Kathleen Jamie Mother-May-I

Simon Armitage Kid

Cynthia Fuller Guests

Simon Armitage

FROM

Book of Matches

Rutger Kopland Johnson Brothers Ltd

Paul Farley Laws of Gravity

Gael Turnbull Transmutation

Vona Groarke Family

Sharon Thesen Animals

Miller Williams Animals

Sharon Olds Forty-one, Alone, No Gerbil

Billy Collins Putting Down the Cat

Elizabeth Smither On the euthanasia of a pet dog

Gerry McGrath ‘Noticing a man unable…’

Howard Nemerov Walking the Dog

4  Love Life

Wisława Szymborska Love at First Sight

Rosemary Tonks Story of a Hotel Room

Lavinia Greenlaw Tryst

Derek Walcott Love After Love

Julia Copus Love, Like Water

Yehuda Amichai To My Love, Combing Her Hair

Cathy Song The White Porch

Zbigniew Herbert Rosy Ear

Margaret Atwood Variation on the Word Sleep

Greta Stoddart The Blindfold

Zbigniew Herbert Silk of a Soul

Derek Walcott The Fist

Deryn Rees-Jones What It’s Like To Be Alive

Hayden Carruth Alive

Robert Hass Misery and Splendor

Sharon Olds This Hour

Galway Kinnell After Making Love We Hear Footsteps

Czesław Miłosz Love

Jack Gilbert The Great Fires

Jane Hirshfield Knowing Nothing

Carol Ann Duffy Warming Her Pearls

Helen Farish Look at These

Liz Lochhead I Wouldn’t Thank You for a Valentine

Carol Ann Duffy Valentine

Pablo Neruda Ode to the Onion

Linda France If Love Was Jazz

Billy Collins Litany

Pablo Neruda

FROM

100 Love Sonnets

Patrick Kavanagh On Raglan Road

Brendan Kennelly Raglan Lane

Stanley Kunitz Touch Me

William Matthews Misgivings

Kerry Hardie The Hunter Home from the Hill

Michael Longley The Waterfall

U.A. Fanthorpe Atlas

Philip Larkin An Arundel Tomb

5  Men and Women

Frederick Seidel Men and Women

C.K. Williams The Dress

Denise Levertov The Mutes

Fred Voss The Inspection

Marge Piercy In the men’s room(s)

Gwen Harwood A Simple Story

Tony Hoagland The Change

Carol Ann Duffy Mrs Midas

Anne Rouse Spunk Talking

Tom Leonard Four of the Belt

Chris Greenhalgh A Man in the Valley of the Women

Roddy Lumsden Prayer To Be with Mercurial Women

Wendy Cope Bloody Men

Clare Pollard And Another Bloody Thing…

Charles Bukowksi sexpot

Radmila Lazic I’ll Be a Wicked Old Woman

Deborah Randall Ballygrand Widow

Kim Addonizio ‘What Do Women Want?’

Liz Lochhead Rapunzstiltskin

John Agard English Girl Eats Her First Mango

David Constantine Pleasure

Minnie Bruce Pratt Done

Selima Hill Please Can I Have a Man

Billy Collins Man in Space

Alice Oswald Wedding

Michael Laskey The Tightrope Wedding

Philip Larkin The Whitsun Weddings

Michael Longley The Pattern

Dorothy Molloy Les Grands Seigneurs

Selima Hill Being a Wife

Denise Levertov The Ache of Marriage

Sylvia Plath The Applicant

Dorothy Nimmo Good Gifts

Jacques Prévert Breakfast

Dorothy Nimmo Ill-Wishing Him

Liz Lochhead My Way

Cheryl Follon Love Rats

Duncan Forbes Recension Day

Michael Blackburn Before That

Catherine Smith The New Bride

Helen Ivory Sleeping with the Fishes

James Fenton Let’s Go Over It All Again

Eleanor Brown Sonnet

6  Being and Loss

Wallace Stevens The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Jackie Kay Somebody Else

James Merrill Mirror

Michael Davitt The Mirror

Chase Twichell Cat and Mirror

Gael Turnbull Transmutation

Henri Cole Original Face

Aleksandar Ristovic The essential

Marin Sorescu Pond

W.B. Yeats The Circus Animals’ Desertion

Jack Gilbert Measuring the Tyger

César Vallejo The black heralds

John Berryman

FROM

Dream Songs (155)

Paul Durcan The Death by Heroin of Sid Vicious

Jane Kenyon Otherwise

James Fenton The Mistake

C.P. Cavafy Che Fece…Il Gran Rifiuto

Andrew Waterhouse Speaking About My Cracked Sump

Tracey Herd Ophelia’s Confession

Selima Hill Hairbrush

Polly Clark Elvis the Performing Octopus

Sarah Wardle Flight

Kerry Hardie Autumn Cancer

Julia Darling Chemotherapy

Gael Turnbull Transmutation

Kerry Hardie She Replies to Carmel’s Letter

Kenneth Mackenzie Caesura

David Scott Heart

Esther Jansma Descent

Carole Satyamurti Broken Moon

Wendy Cope Names

Bob Hicok Alzheimer’s

Alison Pryde Have We Had Easter Yet?

Tony Hoagland Lucky

Mark Doty Brilliance

Pearse Hutchinson Flames

Nick Drake The Very Rich Hours

Mark Doty The Embrace

Kerry Hardie What’s Left

Lucille Clifton poem to my uterus

Lucille Clifton to my last period

Howard Moss The Pruned Tree

James K. Baxter Tomcat

David Constantine The Hoist

R.S. Thomas Lore

Grace Paley Here

Anne Stevenson Who’s Joking with the Photographer?

Fleur Adcock Weathering

Lauris Edmond 3

A.M.

C.K. Williams The Shade

Frederick Seidel Dune Road, Southampton

Matthew Sweeney The Box

Gerard Woodward The Murderer Is a Cow

Jacob Polley Moving House

Imtiaz Dharker This room

Naomi Shihab Nye Kindness

7  Daily Round

William Bronk The Way

Glyn Maxwell The Nerve

Simon Armitage Killing Time #2

Louis MacNeice Bagpipe Music

Dennis O’Driscoll Life

Roo Borson City Lights

August Kleinzahler Snow in North Jersey

William Matthews Grief

Helen Dunmore To Virgil

Maura Dooley Mind the Gap

Jo Shapcott My Life Asleep

David Constantine New Year Behind the Asylum

Alden Nowlan Great Things Have Happened

Thom Gunn Night Taxi

Ken Smith Message on the machine

Brendan Kennelly Clearing a Space

Ciaran Carson Clearance

Ciaran Carson Turn Again

Edward Hirsch In Spite of Everything, the Stars

Jack Gilbert Searching for Pittsburgh

Lavinia Greenlaw Zombies

Dennis O’Driscoll Home

Philip Levine What Work Is

Al Purdy Alive or Not

Jacques Prévert At the Florist’s

Anne Rouse Her Retirement

Philip Larkin Toads

Robert Phillips The Panic Bird

Julie O’Callaghan Managing the Common Herd:

Deborah Garrison Fight Song

Peter Didsbury A Malediction

Rita Ann Higgins Some People

Rodney Jones TV

Vicki Feaver The Way We Live

Philip Levine Every Blessed Day

Tom French Pity the Bastards

Ruth Dallas Photographs of Pioneer Women

Donald Hall Names of Horses

George Mackay Brown The Ballad of John Barleycorn, The Ploughman, and the Furrow

Grace Nichols Sugar Cane

Linda Gregg Fish Tea Rice

Derek Mahon Everything Is Going To Be All Right

Stanley Kunitz The Round

8  Lives

Derek Mahon Lives

Brendan Kennelly The Story

Gael Turnbull Transmutation

Suzanne Cleary Acting

Elizabeth Smither The sea question

Esther Morgan The Sea

Michael Harlow No Problem, But Not Easy

Joanne Limburg Seder Night with My Ancestors

Agha Shahid Ali The Dacca Gauzes

Maya Angelou Still I Rise

Gwendolyn Brooks Sadie and Maud

Douglas Dunn Glasgow Schoolboys, Running Backwards

Denis Glover The Magpies

Paul Muldoon The Loaf

Vona Groarke Imperial Measure

Billy Collins Nostalgia

Thomas Lux Plague Victims Catapulted over Walls into Besieged City

Ken Smith Part of the crowd that day

Tom Paulin Desertmartin

Derek Mahon Ecclesiastes

Andrew Waterhouse Now the City Has Fallen

Peter Reading

FROM

Going On

Imtiaz Dharker Honour Killing

Carol Rumens Geography Lesson

W.H. Auden Refugee Blues

George Szirtes My father carries me across a field

Choman Hardi Escape Journey, 1988

Kapka Kassabova Someone else’s life

Jane Griffiths Migration

Carl Sandburg Limited

Moniza Alvi Arrival, 1946

C.P. Cavafy The City

Ken Smith Malenki robot

Saadi Youssef The Mouse

Carol Rumens The Emigrée

James Fenton The Ideal

Gwyneth Lewis A Poet’s Confession

Zbigniew Herbert Tongue

Mihangel Morgan Conversation

W.S. Merwin Losing a Language

Zbigniew Herbert From the Technology of Tears

Agha Shahid Ali

FROM

The Country Without a Post Office

Yehuda Amichai ‘The Rustle of History’s Wings,’ as They Used to Say Then

Yehuda Amichai Jerusalem

James Fenton Jerusalem

Mahmoud Darwish In This Land

Moniza Alvi The Sari

James Fenton Wind

9  Mad World

Robert Pinsky ABC

Gerald Stern The Dog

Emily Dickinson ‘I reason, Earth is short…’

William Stafford Earth Dweller

Hans Magnus Enzensberger The End of the Owls

Miroslav Holub The end of the world

Edwin Muir The Horses

Vijay Seshadri The Disappearances

W.H. Auden The Shield of Achilles

Edwin Brock Five Ways to Kill a Man

Tadeusz Różewicz Pigtail

Primo Levi Shemà

Tadeusz Różewicz The survivor

(attr.) Martin Niemöller ‘First they came for the Jews…’

Erich Fried What Happens

Adrian Mitchell To Whom It May Concern

W.H. Auden ‘When Statesmen gravely say…’

Hans Magnus Enzensberger Explaining the Declaration

Aleksandar Ristovic Untitled

Bertolt Brecht War Has Been Given a Bad Name

Mahmoud Darwish He Embraces His Murderer

Bertolt Brecht

FROM

A German War Primer

Heberto Padilla Song of the Juggler

Erich Fried Conversation with a Survivor

Jackie Kay Twelve Bar Bessie

Adrienne Rich

FROM

An Atlas of the Difficult World

Genevieve Taggard At Last the Women Are Moving

Carole Satyamurti Ourstory

Marge Piercy The low road

Luis Enrique Mejía Godoy Revenge

Czesław Miłosz Dedication

Douglas Dunn Ratatouille

Paul Durcan In Memory: The Miami Showband – Massacred 31 July 1975

James Merrill Casual Wear

Yehuda Amichai The Diameter of the Bomb

Norman MacCaig The Red and the Black

Sinéad Morrissey The Wound Man

John Burnside History

C.K. Williams The Hearth

W.H. Auden Musée des Beaux Arts

Wisława Szymborska Reality Demands

Adam Zagajewski Try to Praise the Mutilated World

Faiz Ahmed Faiz A Prison Evening

Adrienne Rich To the Days

Sheenagh Pugh Sometimes

Eva Salzman Spells

Helen Dunmore Glad of these times

Jen Hadfield Staple Island Swing

10  Ends and Beginnings

Philip Larkin The Trees

M.R. Peacocke Late Snow

C.P. Cavafy Candles

Saadi Youssef Night in Al-Hamra

Helen Dunmore Candle poem

Mark Strand A Piece of the Storm

Bernard O’Donoghue Going Without Saying

Patrick Kavanagh Wet Evening in April

W.S. Merwin For the Anniversary of My Death

Adrienne Rich Final Notations

Raymond Carver Gravy

Jane Kenyon In the Nursing Home

Jo Shapcott Lovebirds

Sharon Olds Beyond Harm

Roy Fisher The Entertainment of War

Seamus Heaney Mid-Term Break

Robert Kroetsch Sounding the name

Stephen Dobyns When a Friend

Edwin Brock And another thing…

Michael Longley Detour

Paul Durcan Tullynoe: Tête-à-Tête in the Priest’s Parlour

Bernard O’Donoghue Concordiam in Populo

Elizabeth Smither A cortège of daughters

Meg Bateman After the Funeral

Virginia Hamilton-Adair A Last Marriage

Anne Stevenson Musician’s Widow

Lauris Edmond Anniversary

R.S. Thomas A Marriage

Carol Muske-Dukes Love Song

Ruth Stone Poems

Antonio Machado The Eyes

Ruth Stone Curtains

Elizabeth Jennings Not at Home

Jane Hirshfield A Room

Brendan Kennelly We Are Living

Marie Howe What the Living Do

Norman Nicholson Sea to the West

Lauris Edmond Girls

Czesław Miłosz A Mistake

Tony Hoagland Migration

Michael Hartnett A Prayer for Sleep

Ruth Pitter The Task

James K. Baxter

FROM

Autumn Testament

Mary Oliver Some Questions You Might Ask

M.K. Joseph A Riddle: Of the Soul

Michael Hartnett ‘There will be a talking…’

Gary Snyder For the children

Ruth Stone In the Next Galaxy

Jane Kenyon Let Evening Come

T.S. Eliot

FROM

Four Quartets

Further reading

Acknowledgements

Index of writers

Index of titles and first lines

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever 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.

EMILY DICKINSON

Being Alive is the sequel to Staying Alive, which became Britain’s most popular poetry book within a fortnight of publication in 2002. Staying Alive didn’t just reach a broader readership, it introduced thousands of new readers to contemporary poetry, giving them an international gathering of poems with emotional power, intellectual edge and playful wit. It also brought many readers back to poetry, people who hadn’t read poetry for years because it hadn’t held their interest.

Staying Alive was taken up by readers because it gave them hundreds of thoughtful and passionate poems about living in the modern world. This companion anthology is for all those people 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.

While this new anthology has been conceived as a sequel to Staying Alive, the power and range of the selection are such that it can be read just as fruitfully on its own. Like Staying Alive, it is a bridge anthology, a book designed to make its readers want to read more work by the poets it features, and I would hope that new readers who come first to Being Alive would make Staying Alive their next port of call. This would not be a backward step but rather a broadening out from Being Alive.

Being Alive takes readers on a journey through the world of contemporary poetry, stopping off for encounters and meetings. Many of the poems seem almost alive to the living world, alert to what they sense and summon up through language. Reading and re-reading them, I feel the jolt of a live connection, a quickening of consciousness. I hope this is something which readers will share, and that Being Alive will pass Emily Dickinson’s now famous test for true poetry, that it makes you feel as if the top of your head has been lifted off.

Housman described how poetry affected him in similarly physical terms: ‘Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.’

Those two comments were very much in my mind when I was choosing poems for Being Alive. I wanted to give readers as many hair-raising, head-lifting poems as possible in the one book, but to vary the selection with different kinds of poems, balancing heartrending, gut-wrenching poems of explosive power with gentler, playful, witty, thought-provoking poems of tenderness and sensuality. All these are poems which I feel had to be written. And because they were necessary poems for the writers, I hope readers will find them as compelling as I do. There are a lot of modern poems which don’t engage me as a reader, either because they’re too clever for their own good or too simplistic in their sentiments. The American poet William Stafford once said: ‘I don’t want to write good poems. I want to write inevitable poems – to write the things I will write, given who I am.’ That’s the kind I look for, poems which the poet needed to write, poems whose integrity derives from an honest and truthful engagement with living language and with living in the world.

These aren’t poems which just confirm what we already know. Another American poet, James Tate, said: ‘What we want from poetry is to be moved, to be moved from where we now stand. We don’t just want to have our ideas or emotions confirmed. Or if we do, then we turn to lesser poems, poems which are happy to tell you killing children is bad, chopping down the rainforest is bad, dying is sad.’ In other words, good poetry doesn’t offer simple solace or poetic medication, it opens up the senses, it disturbs, questions and challenges. These poems make the reader less settled yet more whole, more alert to the world, more alive, more in touch with being human.

Paul Muldoon puts it rather well: ‘The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away.’ Being Alive and Staying Alive include many breathtaking poems by all kinds of writers from many different countries, classes, cultural backgrounds and literary traditions. These take the reader by surprise because the voice, style, stance or angle of approach are often quite different from what’s expected.

When I first had the idea for Staying Alive, it was for a diverse and lively book to introduce new readers to contemporary poetry as well as to show existing poetry readers (whose access to international poetry is restricted by the narrowness of British publishing) a wider range of poems from around the world. I had no thoughts then of a sequel, but I also had no idea that the book would be championed so enthusiastically that readers would want a companion anthology.

Staying Alive was my response to the findings of a readership survey. This presented a damning picture of how poetry was viewed by the general public: how people whose knowledge of modern poetry was very limited would dismiss it as obscure, difficult, dull, boring or pretentious. Modern poetry, according to their comments, was irrelevant and incomprehensible, so they didn’t bother with it, not even readers of literary fiction and people interested in other arts which use language, such as theatre and film; and not even people who read Shakespeare and the classics: one of the most surprising findings of that research was that only 5% of the poetry books sold in British bookshops were by living poets.

Staying Alive was my attempt to show all those people who love literature and language and traditional poetry that contemporary poetry is relevant to their own lives; and that much of it is lively, imaginative and accessible to intelligent readers who might not have given it much of a chance before. And that didn’t involve dumbing down, but choosing lucid poems to entice new readers. There’s no conflict here between access and excellence.

Staying Alive won thousands of new readers for poetry largely because of word of mouth: reader power. And those readers didn’t just buy one copy for themselves, they bought more and more to give to friends and family as presents. Staying Alive is still being discovered by new readers. Two years after the book appeared, I’m still receiving letters, postcards and e-mails expressing people’s appreciation, messages of support and thanks, all saying how much Staying Alive had helped or stimulated them and fired up their interest in poetry. These responses are not untypical:

ROB MARCHMENT

: ‘I just wanted to say that I am completely blown away by your anthology!…I feel as if I have reconnected with the flesh and blood of poetry once again.’

ANTHEA MATTHISON

: ‘I am writing to thank you, as a reader, for showing me a way back to poetry after years of alienation.’

JONATHAN WOOD

: ‘I have read hardly any poetry in my 46 years. I found it disconcerting and difficult…I have been moved to tears and laughter by the poems I read in the last two days and carry the book everywhere…thank you for publishing and editing this wonderful anthology. I have found a new world.’

MAGGIE BUTT

: ‘It is a joy to read something celebratory in a world where it is fashionable to talk everything down. Our students arrive at University with a curiously ambivalent attitude to poetry. Many say they hate it, but most write it. I think your book will go a long way to persuading them they don’t hate it after all.’

JOHN M

c

DONAGH

: ‘It will be a staple in my First year course for a while to come. Indeed, this course is crucial in the college as the students have a choice whether or not to do English in the first few weeks and Staying Alive has shown them that poetry has a relevance and a unique ability to speak to us as human beings.’

JOANNE GONZALEZ

(writing of a poet friend): ‘She is 90, and blind. I had just bought Staying Alive and began reading it to her. I do not exaggerate to say she was transformed. She asked to hold the book, and pressed it against her forehead. She chose life today because of your book. I have a lump in my throat as I write this. I thank you, poetry does matter.’

The Staying Alive postbag also includes notes from readers about other poems which have been important to them in their own lives, many of which I have now been able to include in Being Alive. And readers have expressed their thanks for being introduced to many poets they had never heard of before and whose books they had then sought out, including many whose poetry isn’t published in Britain. Two poets in particular aroused a strong response, America’s Mary Oliver and Canada’s favourite modern poet, Alden Nowlan, and Bloodaxe is now publishing separate editions of their poetry as the first titles in a new series called Bloodaxe World Poets.

Being Alive joins a family of books aimed at opening up the readership of contemporary poetry. It is not only a sequel to Staying Alive, but the first of two companion anthologies, to be followed in 2008 by Being Human. The range and personal relevance of Being Alive have been strengthened by all those readers of Staying Alive who’ve written offering not just thanks but valuable suggestions. I hope more people will write in response to Being Alive, ensuring that Being Human will be a companion anthology even more closely tuned to the interests and taste of readers. And if there are other poets from around the world whose books you would like to see published in Britain, do write and tell me. Then you may be able to experience something like the delight felt by the boy in Gael Turnbull’s ‘Transmutation’ (357) whose grandmother tells him stories influenced by his own wishes. Too often, editors think of themselves and their poet friends as the only arbiters of taste, only publishing writers they think people ought to read and depriving readers of other kinds of poetry which many would find more rewarding. Being Alive, like Staying Alive, tries to give readers a much wider choice.

My own journey into modern poetry began in the 60s with the Liverpool Poets’ Mersey Sound. That book was the magic bus which opened my mind to thousands of other poets. If Being Alive captures your imagination, I hope it will become your own bridge to a whole alternative world of contemporary poetry.

NEIL ASTLEY

1

Exploring the World

Good poets are the explorers of the world. Out on the frontiers, they send back bulletins.

EAMON GRENNAN

A poem should take you somewhere different…a poet should be the one least likely to step into the same river twice.

SEAMUS HEANEY

THIS BOOK’S JOURNEY

through the world begins with poetry itself, followed by celebrations of the natural world, journey poems and some of those meetings mentioned in the Introduction: here the encounters are with birds, while in section 2 they’re with animals and fish. But these are not the familiar kind of nature poems typical of traditional pastoral verse: indeed, what they evoke is not familiarity but unfamiliarity in crossing paths with other lives, opening up the self to otherness. Just as in Lawrence’s animal poems, the writers feel a quickening of consciousness in meeting another creature, and the poem captures that pivotal moment. In Elizabeth Bishop’s poems, her insights into the world are achieved through acute observation, as in ‘The Fish’ (70). In this section, Bishop’s ‘At the Fishhouses’ (31) shows poetry’s transforming power, her accumulation of minute detail leading to the incantatory finale where the sea is described as like knowledge, ‘flowing and drawn, and since / our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown’. That word ‘flown’ is the past participle not of ‘flow’ but of ‘fly’; ‘flown’, chiming with ‘drawn’, sounds better than ‘flowed’, but completely changes the sense. James Merrill, Anne Stevenson and Robert Pinsky have all written illuminating commentaries on these few lines.

The journey poems include Cavafy’s quintessential life-quest poem ‘Ithaka’ (36) in which the journey itself is what’s important, not the final landing (the Laistrygonians and the Cyclops were giants encountered by Odysseus on his ten-year odyssey after the Trojan War).

The idea of disappearance has fascinated many poets (Staying Alive, 407-11). Larkin focuses on those left behind in ‘Poetry of Departures’ (38), while Derek Mahon (39) and Matthew Sweeney (40) follow their fugitives. Mahon’s ‘The Mayo Tao’ (41) evokes a remote place of refuge in the same Irish landscape memorably celebrated by Michael Longley in ‘Echoes’ (42) and other poems from his books The Ghost Orchid, The Weather in Japan and Snow Water.

This Poem…

This poem is dangerous: it should not be left

Within the reach of children, or even of adults

Who might swallow it whole, with possibly

Undesirable side-effects. If you come across

An unattended, unidentified poem

In a public place, do not attempt to tackle it

Yourself. Send it (preferably, in a sealed container)

To the nearest centre of learning, where it will be rendered

Harmless, by experts. Even the simplest poem

May destroy your immunity to human emotions.

All poems must carry a Government warning. Words

Can seriously affect your heart.

ELMA MITCHELL

The Iceberg Theory

all the food critics hate iceberg lettuce.

you’d think romaine was descended from

orpheus’s laurel wreath,

you’d think raw spinach had all the nutritional

benefits attributed to it by popeye,

not to mention aesthetic subtleties worthy of

verlaine and debussy.

they’ll even salivate over chopped red cabbage

just to disparage poor old mr iceberg lettuce.

I guess the problem is

it’s just too common for them.

it doesn’t matter that it tastes good,

has a satisfying crunchy texture,

holds its freshness,

and has crevices for the dressing,

whereas the darker, leafier varieties

are often bitter, gritty, and flat.

it just isn’t different enough, and

it’s too goddamn american.

of course a critic has to criticise:

a critic has to have something to say.

perhaps that’s why literary critics

purport to find interesting

so much contemporary poetry

that just bores the shit out of me.

at any rate, I really enjoy a salad

with plenty of chunky iceberg lettuce,

the more the merrier,

drenched in an italian or roquefort dressing.

and the poems I enjoy are those I don’t have

to pretend that I’m enjoying.

GERALD LOCKLIN

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski

across the surface of a poem

waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.

BILLY COLLINS

The Horses of Meaning

Let their hooves print the next bit of the story:

Release them roughmaned

From the dark stable where

They rolled their dark eyes, shifted and stamped –

Let them out, and follow the sound, a regular clattering

On the cobbles of the yard, a pouring round the corner

Into the big field, a booming canter.

Now see where they rampage,

And whether they are suddenly halted

At the check of the line westward

Where the train passes at dawn –

If they stare at land that looks white in patches

As if it were frayed to bone (the growing light

Will detail as a thickening of small white flowers),

Can this be the end of their flight?

The wind combs their long tails, their stalls are empty.

EILÉAN NÍ CHUILLEANÁIN

Symposium

You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it hold

its nose to the grindstone and hunt with the hounds.

Every dog has a stitch in time. Two heads? You’ve been sold

Reviews for Being Alive

[elder_adok · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A good balance and range

[peterclack · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An excellent collection of poetry arranged according under some surprising headings. If you want a poetry anthology then this is the one to get!