Staying Alive: real poems for unreal times

By Neil Astley

Staying Alive is an international anthology of 500 life-affirming poems fired by belief in the human and the spiritual at a time when much in the world feels unreal, inhuman and hollow. These are poems of great personal force connecting our aspirations with our humanity, helping us stay alive to the world and stay true to ourselves. The Staying Alive trilogy of anthologies have introduced many thousands of new readers to contemporary poetry.

Many people turn to poetry only at unreal times, whether for consolation in loss or affirmation in love, or when facing other extremes and anxieties. Staying Alive includes many of the great modern love poems and elegies, but it also shows the power of poetry in celebrating the ordinary miracle, taking you on a journey around many of the different aspects of everyday life explored in poems.

A strong poem is not just for crisis. Such a poem is there for all times, helping us face or embrace daily change and disruption. It will also speak to us when nothing seems to be happening, when the poem's importance is in helping us stay alive to the world and stay true to ourselves.

Staying Alive has reached a wider readership than any other anthology of contemporary poetry. It is a landmark in the history of literary publishing. A sequel, Being Alive (2004), and 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.

‘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: Aug 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781780371764

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

STAYING ALIVE

real poems for unreal times

Edited by Neil Astley

Staying Alive is an international anthology of 500 life-affirming poems fired by belief in the human and the spiritual at a time when much in the world feels unreal, inhuman and hollow. These are poems of great personal force connecting our aspirations with our humanity, helping us stay alive to the world and stay true to ourselves. The Staying Alive poetry trilogy – Staying Alive, Being Alive and Being Human – have introduced many thousands of new readers to contemporary poetry.

‘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

Cover photograph: Mariona (1988) by Carles Fargas

STAYING ALIVE

real poems for unreal times

edited by

NEIL ASTLEY

‘One should only read books which bite and sting one. If the book we are reading does not wake us up with a blow to the head, what’s the point in reading? A book must be the axe which smashes the frozen sea within us.’

FRANZ KAFKA

‘If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.’

EMILY DICKINSON

CONTENTS

Title Page

Epigraph

Various Poets on poetry

Neil Astley Introduction

Mary Oliver Wild Geese

1 Body and soul

Denise Levertov Living

Andrew Greig Orkney / This Life

Alistair Elliot Northern Morning

Raymond Carver Happiness

James Merrill My Father’s Irish Setters

Vernon Scannell Legs

Lucille Clifton homage to my hips

Gwen Harwood Naked Vision

Thom Gunn The Hug

Tess Gallagher The Hug

Elizabeth Bishop Chemin de Fer

Alden Nowlan He Sits Down on the Floor of a School for the Retarded

Les Murray An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow

Michael Longley A Prayer

Carol Ann Duffy Prayer

Czesław Miłosz Encounter

Rainer Maria Rilke

FROM

The Tenth Duino Elegy

Denise Levertov Variation on a Theme by Rilke

Gjertrud Schnackenberg

FROM

A Gilded Lapse of Time

Kevin Hart Dark Angel

Nina Cassian Temptation

Sylvia Plath Poppies in October

Osip Mandelstam ‘Eyesight of Wasps’

David Constantine The Wasps

Charles Simic The Old World

Robert Bly Watering the Horse

Chase Twichell Saint Animal

Carol Rumens Jarrow

Stephen Dobyns Where We Are

2 Roads and journeys

Robert Frost The Road Not Taken

James K. Baxter The Bay

Elizabeth Garrett Tyranny of Choice

Stevie Smith Not Waving but Drowning

Simon Armitage Poem

Carl Sandburg Choose

Vladimír Holan Meeting in a Lift

E.E. Cummings ‘i thank You God for most this amazing’

Dennis O’Driscoll You

Brendan Kennelly Begin

Louis MacNeice Entirely

Adrienne Rich Integrity

Galway Kinnell The Bear

Delmore Schwartz The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me

John Berryman

FROM

Dream Songs

Tracey Herd

FROM

Some mangled dream songs for Henry

Freda Downie Window

Miroslav Holub The door

Kapka Kassabova The Door

Robert Frost Directive

Gillian Allnutt The Road Home

Robert Frost Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Louis MacNeice Snow

Paul Muldoon History

Maura Dooley History

Vladimír Holan Snow

Lawrence Sail The Cablecar

Galway Kinnell That Silent Evening

Mary Oliver The Journey

Helen Dunmore When You’ve Got

Muriel Rukeyser Yes

Stephen Dunn Happiness

Michael Donaghy Machines

Tomas Tranströmer Alone

Menna Elfyn Couplings

William Stafford Traveling through the Dark

John Burnside Penitence

W.N. Herbert Slow Animals Crossing

Elizabeth Bishop The Moose

Thomas Lux Wife Hits Moose

3 Dead or alive

Jaan Kaplinski ‘To eat a pie and to have it…’

Louise Glück Trillium

Elizabeth Daryush ‘I saw the daughter of the sun…’

Frieda Hughes Stonepicker

Marin Sorescu The Arrow

Christopher Logue Be Not Too Hard

Charles Simic Modern Sorcery

Vona Groarke Tonight of Yesterday

Hayden Carruth Sonnet

James Wright Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm

William Empson Missing Dates

Weldon Kees Villanelle

Gjertrud Schnackenberg Signs

Galway Kinnell

FROM

When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone

Brendan Kennelly My Dark Fathers

Kit Wright Hoping It Might Be So

Charles Wright Clear Night

Robert Bly Defeated

Theodore Roethke The Waking

Kapka Kassabova Mirages

Eibhlín Nic Eochaidh How to kill a living thing

Anne Michaels

FROM

Sublimation

Chase Twichell Horse

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin Swineherd

Kathleen Jamie The way we live

Connie Bensley Apologia

Rosemary Tonks Addiction to an Old Mattress

Fleur Adcock Things

Elma Mitchell Thoughts After Ruskin

Elizabeth Bartlett Themes for Women

Maura Dooley What Every Woman Should Carry

Ruth Fainlight Handbag

Jenny Joseph Warning

Theodore Roethke Dolor

Elizabeth Bishop One Art

Louise Glück Lamium

May Sarton A Glass of Water

Stephen Dunn Sadness

Stephen Dunn Sweetness

Alden Nowlan The Execution

James Wright A Note Left in Jimmy Leonard’s Shack

Bertolt Brecht Epistle on Suicide

Stevie Smith Harold’s Leap

Anne Sexton Her Kind

Tracey Herd Anne Sexton’s Last Letter to God

Robert Frost My November Guest

Edward Thomas She Dotes

R.S. Thomas The Cry

Vachel Lindsay The Leaden-Eyed

Ezra Pound And the Days Are Not Full Enough

Douglas Dunn A Removal from Terry Street

4 Bittersweet

Matthew Sweeney Tube Ride to Martha’s

Peter Reading

FROM

Ukulele Music

Ken Smith Against the grain

Wisława Szymborska The One Twenty Pub

Izet Sarajlic Luck in Sarajevo

Michael Longley All of These People

Muriel Rukeyser Waking This Morning

Douglas Dunn I Am a Cameraman

Philip Gross

FROM

The Wasting Game

Leontia Flynn Brinkwomanship

Ken Smith Here

U.A. Fanthorpe The Unprofessionals

Stewart Conn Visiting Hour

Carole Satyamurti

FROM

Changing the Subject

Nick Drake The Cure

Charles Simic Past-Lives Therapy

Adrienne Rich Diving into the Wreck

Richard Wilbur April 5, 1974

Michael Longley At Poll Salach

Edward Thomas Thaw

Michael Longley Thaw

Fleur Adcock Kissing

Leland Bardwell How my true love and I lay without touching

Basil Bunting ‘You idiot!…’

Randall Jarrell 90 North

E.J. Scovell Listening to Collared Doves

David Constantine Watching for Dolphins

Jo Shapcott Goat

Peter Didsbury The Drainage

Helen Dunmore Three Ways of Recovering a Body

Ted Hughes Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days

Sylvia Plath Mushrooms

Derek Mahon A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford

John Burnside Unwittingly

5 Growing up

Ken Smith Being the third song of Urias

Sujata Bhatt White Asparagus

Alden Nowlan It’s Good To Be Here

Kathleen Jamie Ultrasound

Helen Dunmore Safe period

Kona Macphee IVF

Jane Duran Miscarriage

Maura Dooley Freight

Sharon Olds First Birth

Sharon Olds Her First Week

Anne Stevenson The Spirit is too Blunt an Instrument

Gavin Ewart Sonnet: How Life Too Is Sentimental

Anne Stevenson Poem for a Daughter

Ellen Bryant Voigt Daughter

Adrian Mitchell Beattie Is Three

W.D. Snodgrass

FROM

Heart’s Needle

Gjertrud Schnackenberg Supernatural Love

Brendan Kennelly Poem from a Three Year Old

Roger McGough Cinders

Kenneth Rexroth A Sword in a Cloud of Light

János Pilinszky On the Back of a Photograph

Fleur Adcock The Video

P.K. Page Young Girls

Adrian Mitchell A Puppy Called Puberty

Adrian Mitchell A Dog Called Elderly

Paul Muldoon Cuba

Michael Donaghy My Flu

Charles Simic ‘We were so poor…’

Robert Hayden Those Winter Sundays

Julia Copus The Back Seat of My Mother’s Car

Louise Glück Mirror Image

Sylvia Plath Mirror

Anne Carson Father’s Old Blue Cardigan

Philip Larkin This Be the Verse

Caitríona O’Reilly Possession

Randall Jarrell A Night with Lions

Joseph Brodsky

FROM

A Part of Speech

Edward Thomas Old Man

Randall Jarrell Thinking of the Lost World

Paul Muldoon Quoof

Hart Crane Forgetfulness

Billy Collins Forgetfulness

W.S. Merwin Unknown Forbear

David Scott Groundsmen

6 Man and beast

Les Murray Pigs

Dennis O’Driscoll Experimental Animals

Alden Nowlan Weakness

Stephen Dobyns Spiritual Chickens

James Dickey The Heaven of Animals

Nina Cassian Sacrilege

Elena Shvarts Remembrance of Strange Hospitality

Julie O’Callaghan Federal Case

Frank O’Hara Animals

Charles Simic ‘The city had fallen…’

Robert Adamson The stone curlew

Polly Clark My Life with Horses

Seán Ó Riordáin Switch

James Wright A Blessing

Michael Longley The Horses

Seamus Heaney The Skunk

Thom Gunn Considering the Snail

Fleur Adcock For a Five-Year-Old

Ted Hughes Full Moon and Little Frieda

Frieda Hughes Birds

John Montague The Trout

Susan Wicks Night Toad

Sheila Wingfield A Bird

John Kinsella Emu Hunt

Lavinia Greenlaw Night Parrot

Ted Hughes The Thought Fox

Michael Longley Swans Mating

Michael Ondaatje The Strange Case

Selima Hill Cow

Katrina Porteous Seven Silences

Jo Shapcott Lies

Vicki Feaver Glow Worm

Jorie Graham Salmon

Richard Murphy Seals at High Island

Chris Greenhalgh Of Love, Death and the Sea-Squirt

Caitríona O’Reilly Octopus

Pablo Neruda Fable of the mermaid and the drunks

Stephen Knight The Mermaid Tank

Edwin Morgan The Loch Ness Monster’s Song

Gwendolyn MacEwen The Death of the Loch Ness Monster

Seamus Heaney Oysters

7 In and out of love

Paul Durcan My Belovèd Compares Herself to a Pint of Stout

Deborah Randall Finney’s Bar

Tracy Ryan Bite

Selima Hill Desire’s a Desire

Marge Piercy Raisin Pumpernickel

C.K. Williams Love: Beginnings

Pauline Stainer The Honeycomb

Michael Longley The Linen Industry

Sharon Olds Last Night

János Pilinszky Definition of Your Attraction

Michael Ondaatje The Cinnamon Peeler

Sharon Olds True Love

W.H. Auden Lullaby

Julia Copus In Defence of Adultery

Rita Ann Higgins The Did-You-Come-Yets of the Western World

C.K. Williams The Mistress

Sharon Olds Ecstasy

D.H. Lawrence New Year’s Eve

Salvatore Quasimodo Only if Love Should Pierce You

Jo Shapcott Muse

Jo Shapcott Life

Philippe Jaccottet Distances

David Constantine ‘As our bloods separate’

Judith Wright Woman to Man

Gjertrud Schnackenberg Snow Melting

Esta Spalding August

Kevin Hart The Room

Selima Hill Don’t Let’s Talk about Being in Love

Katie Donovan Yearn On

Carolyn Kizer Bitch

Eleanor Brown Bitcherel

Katherine Pierpoint This Dead Relationship

Stephen Dunn Each from Different Heights

Rosemary Tonks Badly-Chosen Lover

Anne Stevenson After the End of It

János Pilinszky Relationship

Louise Glück Hesitate to Call

Nina Cassian Lady of Miracles

Fleur Adcock Advice to a Discarded Lover

Kit Wright The All Purpose Country and Western Self Pity Song

James McAuley Because

P.K. Page Cross

Conrad Aiken The Quarrel

Kapka Kassabova And they were both right

Micheal O’Siadhail Between

W.B. Yeats When You Are Old

Kate Clanchy Spell

Zbigniew Herbert Conch

W.H. Auden ‘O tell me the truth about love’

Meg Bateman Lightness

James Fenton In Paris with You

8 My people

Jaan Kaplinski ‘The East West border…’

Kona Macphee My People

Anna Akhmatova Our Own Land

Richard Wilbur A Summer Morning

Stuart Henson The Heron

Jo Shapcott A Letter to Dennis

Tony Harrison Turns

David Constantine The Door

Peter Reading

FROM

Going On

Peter Didsbury In Britain

Anne Rouse England Nil

Joanne Limburg Barton-in-the-Beans

Esther Morgan The Reason

Philip Pacey Charged Landscape: Uffington

Edward Thomas The Combe

Norman Nicholson Windscale

John Heath-Stubbs The Green Man’s Last Will and Testament

Robyn Bolam Kith

G.F. Dutton passage

Roddy Lumsden An Outlying Station

Peter Reading

FROM

Evagatory

Ken Smith After Mr Mayhew’s visit

Roy Fisher The Nation

Kit Wright Everyone Hates the English

Andrew Salkey A song for England

Tom Leonard The Voyeur

W.N. Herbert The King and Queen of Dumfriesshire

R.S. Thomas Reservoirs

Harri Webb Synopsis of the Great Welsh Novel

Bernard O’Donoghue Westering Home

Gillian Clarke Overheard in Co. Sligo

Patrick Kavanagh Inniskeen Road: July Evening

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill The Language Issue

Colette Bryce Break

Seamus Heaney The Toome Road

Paul Muldoon The Sightseers

Charles Simic Dream Avenue

E.E. Cummings ‘next to of course god america i’

Langston Hughes I, Too

Fred Voss Making America Strong

Imtiaz Dharker They’ll say, ‘She must be from another country’

Jackie Kay In my country

Shirley Geok-lin Lim Modern Secrets

Moniza Alvi Exile

Sophia de Mello Breyner Exile

Jane Griffiths Emigrants

Grace Nichols Epilogue

Carol Ann Duffy In Your Mind

Sophia de Mello Breyner Homeland

Jo Shapcott Motherland

Anna Akhmatova ‘That city that I have loved’

Anne Michaels

FROM

What the Light Teaches

Czesław Miłosz My Faithful Mother Tongue

Adam Zagajewski Betrayal

Glyn Maxwell We Billion Cheered

C.P. Cavafy Waiting for the Barbarians

W.H. Auden Gare du Midi

Weldon Kees The Coming of the Plague

George Szirtes Death by Meteor

Jamie McKendrick Ancient History

9 War and peace

Kate Clanchy War Poetry

Carl Sandburg Grass

Miroslav Holub The fly

Wilfred Owen Anthem for Doomed Youth

Freda Downie For Wilfred Owen

Siegfried Sassoon Everyone Sang

Isaac Rosenberg Returning, we hear the Larks

Edward Thomas As the team’s head-brass

Michael Longley Ceasefire

Paul Durcan The Bloomsday Murders, 16 June 1997

Gwendolyn MacEwen

FROM

The T.E. Lawrence Poems

Keith Douglas Vergissmeinnicht

Mairi MacInnes The Old Naval Airfield

Geoffrey Hill September Song

Bertolt Brecht There is no greater crime than leaving

W.H. Auden September 1, 1939

Bruce Weigl On the Anniversary of Her Grace

Carolyn Forché Selective Service

James Fenton Cambodia

Jo Shapcott Phrase Book

Robert Graves The Persian Version

Tony Harrison Initial Illumination

Ingeborg Bachmann Every Day

César Vallejo

FROM

Spain, take away this cup from me

Wisława Szymborska The End and the Beginning

Thomas Lux The People of the Other Village

10 Disappearing acts

Frances Horovitz Rain – Birdoswald

Michael Longley Björn Olinder’s Pictures

Thomas Blackburn Now Light Congeals

Charles Simic Psalm

Dennis O’Driscoll Someone

Philip Larkin Aubade

Jaan Kaplinski ‘Death does not come from outside…’

A.E. Housman ‘Good creatures…’

Carolyn Kizer Thrall

Tony Harrison Bookends (I)

Ellen Bryant Voigt For My Mother

Dylan Thomas Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

Anon ‘Do not stand at my grave and weep’

W.H. Auden Funeral Blues

Michael Hartnett Death of an Irishwoman

Michael Longley Water-burn

Miroslav Holub The dead

Gösta Ågren Death’s Secret

G.F. Dutton Death in October

David Constantine ‘Pity the drunks’

David Scott Scattering Ashes

Thom Gunn The Gas-poker

David Constantine Boy finds tramp dead

John F. Deane On a Dark Night

Pamela Gillilan Four Years

Caroline Smith Metamorphosis

Liz Lochhead Sorting Through

Alden Nowlan This Is What I Wanted to Sign Off With

Tess Gallagher Wake

P.K. Page About Death

Howard Nemerov The Vacuum

Jeanne Willis Inside Our Dreams

Thom Gunn The Reassurance

Theodore Roethke She

Brendan Kennelly A Glimpse of Starlings

Pablo Neruda Dead Woman

Tess Gallagher Yes

Andrew Motion Close

Sophia de Mello Breyner Inscription

E.E. Cummings ‘Buffalo Bill ’s’

Billy Collins The Dead

Tadeusz Rozewicz Proofs

Anne Carson On Walking Backwards

Stephen Dobyns Cemetery Nights

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

Vladimír Holan Resurrection

Charles Causley Eden Rock

Jo Shapcott When I Died

Dana Gioia All Souls’

Philippe Jaccottet

FROM

Lessons

August Kleinzahler Where Souls Go

Brad Leithauser A Mosquito

Louise Glück The Wild Iris

Derek Mahon Antarctica

Paul Muldoon Why Brownlee Left

Matthew Sweeney Sleep with a Suitcase

Derek Mahon As It Should Be

Amanda Dalton How to Disappear

Vona Groarke Folderol

Weldon Kees Robinson

Sophia de Mello Breyner Night and the House

Miroslav Holub Distant Howling

11 Me, the Earth, the Universe

János Pilinszky Homage to Isaac Newton

Robin Robertson New Gravity

Adam Zagajewski Moment

Yannis Ritsos Morning

Moniza Alvi The Other Room

Miroslav Holub Brief reflection on accuracy

Simon Armitage Zoom!

Seamus Heaney

FROM

Lightenings

Ellen Hinsey On the Uncountable Nature of Things

Amy Clampitt The Sun Underfoot among the Sundews

James Harpur ‘I stretch my arms’

James Merrill A Downward Look

Charles Causley I Am the Song

Vasko Popa

FROM

Games

Derek Walcott Earth

Sheila Wingfield Waking

Ivan V. Lalic Places We Love

R.S. Thomas Moorland

Robin Robertson Three Ways of Looking at God

Kerry Hardie The Avatar

Alden Nowlan Sacrament

T.S. Eliot Journey of the Magi

Wallace Stevens The Snow Man

Patrick Kavanagh Sanctity

R.S. Thomas Via Negativa

Charles Simic To the One Upstairs

Tomas Tranströmer Tracks

Elizabeth Jennings Delay

Norman MacCaig Summer farm

Iain Crichton Smith Tinily a star goes down

Carol Rumens Star Whisper

Gwyneth Lewis

FROM

Zero Gravity

Jane Cooper Rent

Elinor Wylie Full Moon

Kapka Kassabova Preparation for the big emptiness

Elizabeth Bishop The Shampoo

Alice Oswald Mountains

Kit Wright The Other Side of the Mountain

12 The art of poetry

Philippe Jaccottet

FROM

Songs from Below

Archibald MacLeish Ars Poetica

W.S. Graham The Beast in the Space

Alden Nowlan An Exchange of Gifts

Helen Ivory Note to the reader: this is not a poem

Robert Hass Meditation at Lagunitas

Jaan Kaplinski ‘Once I got a postcard…’

Tomas Tranströmer From March 1979

Chase Twichell Animal Languages

Vasko Popa The Story of a Story

Wallace Stevens Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself

Eamon Grennan Detail

Rita Dove Ö

Mark Strand Eating Poetry

Howard Nemerov The Painter Dreaming in the Scholar’s House

Robert Lowell Epilogue

Galway Kinnell Oatmeal

Patrick Kavanagh Consider the Grass Growing

Joan Brossa Note

Seamus Heaney Postscript

Raymond Carver Late Fragment

Neil Astley The Sound of Poetry

Glossary

Further reading

Acknowledgements

Index of writers

Index of titles and first lines

Copyright

POETS ON POETRY

Coleridge: ‘Poetry; the best words in the best order.’

Dana Gioia: ‘Poetry is the art of using words charged with their utmost meaning.’

Keats: ‘It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.’

Yeats: ‘Poetry is truth seen with passion.’

Boswell: ‘Sir, what is poetry?’

Johnson: ‘Why Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.’

Christopher Logue: ‘Poetry cannot be defined, only experienced.’

Wordsworth: ‘Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge …Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity…’

T.S. Eliot: ‘…it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences…a concentration which does not happen consciously or deliberation…Poetry is not a turning loose from emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.’

David Constantine: ‘It is a widening of consciousness, an extension of humanity. We sense an ideal version when we read, and with it arm ourselves, to quarrel with reality.’

Sylvia Plath: ‘My poems do not turn out to be about Hiroshima, but about a child forming itself finger by finger in the dark. They are not about the terrors of mass extinction, but about the bleakness of the moon over a yew tree in a neighboring graveyard…In a sense, these poems are deflections. I do not think they are an escape.’

Archibald MacLeish:

     A poem should not mean

     But be.

R.S. Thomas:

                     Poetry is that

     which arrives at the intellect

     by way of the heart.

INTRODUCTION

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have tried to create a selection which has its own internal drama, so that different kinds of poems seem to answer or echo one another, developing a theme in such a way that the reader engages with what they say as a whole as well as with the poems individually. Some of these links reflect actual connections between certain poets. I have also selected poems which contradict one another, and set them side by side. In the third Dead or Alive section, poems about depression are immediately followed by others which lift you out of sadness into assertion. I’ve used oppositions of this kind through Staying Alive because, as William Blake says, ‘without contraries is no progression’, and just as Blake gives you his Songs of Innocence and Experience, here you will find body and soul, war and peace, God and atheism. Such a structure mirrors that of the poem. Readers often say they are drawn either to the emotional power or to the intellectual complexity of a poem, but all good poetry enacts an interplay between thought and feeling, challenging the intellect at the same time as it draws on emotion. The American poet Theodore Roethke said a poet should think by feeling. The same is true of reading. Randall Jarrell said you need to read good poetry ‘with an attitude that is a mixture of sharp intelligence and of willing emotional empathy, at once penetrating and generous’.

Like this book’s selection, its subtitle Real Poems for Unreal Times is double-edged. These are poems which relate to times which feel unreal as we experience extremes or anxieties in our lives, whether in response to love or death, or to how we deal with change, disruption or simply with living from day to day. But these are also poems relating to the unreal times we live through as people, poems in which language is used with the primal force and feeling too often lost in a modern world which insists on instant comment and immediate communication, in which time is money and everything is costed. And yet sensitivity to language is what distinguishes us as civilised people, both as human beings and as individuals, registering our intelligence as well as our alertness and attention to the lives of others. A poem lives in its language, which is body to its soul. Joseph Brodsky believed that our purpose in life as human beings was ‘to create civilisation’, and that ‘poetry is essentially the soul’s search for its release in language’.

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

David Constantine develops this theme in a fascinating essay on Bertolt Brecht’s poetry, showing how Brecht’s dogmatic requirement that lyric poetry should be ‘useful’ was subverted in his own work. The effect of Brecht’s poems on the reader is not an engagement with his political ideas, says Constantine, but rather ‘a shock, a quickening of consciousness, a becoming alert to better possibilities, an extension, a liberation’, for such poetry is, ‘to put it mildly, a useful thing if, when reading it, we sense a better way of being in the world’.

Heaney has said he is not a political writer and he doesn’t see literature as a way of solving political problems, yet he also believes in the poet as spiritual witness, in the transforming power of poetry: the spirit at bay, making a stand, the poet trying writing ‘to teach the free man how to praise’ as Auden put it in his elegy for Yeats, which Heaney calls ‘a rallying cry that celebrates poetry for being on the side of life, and continuity of effort, and enlargement of the spirit’. Sylvia Plath wanted poetry to be ‘solid and miraculous’ in the face of adversity: ‘Surely the great use of poetry is its pleasure – not its influence as religious or political propaganda.’ Constantine adds that ‘poetry will effect its greatest redress if, especially in the dark times, it asserts its traditional lyric freedom, treats the subjects it always has treated, and keeps its formal options as open as possible’.

Heaney’s vision of poetry is of ‘a glimpsed alternative’, poetry being ‘instrumental in adjusting and correcting imbalances in the world, poetry as an intended intervention into the goings-on of society – even then, poetry is involved with supreme fictions as well as actual conditions…To redress poetry in this sense is to know it and celebrate it for its forcibleness as itself, as the affirming spiritual flame which W.H. Auden wanted to be shown forth.’ Auden held out that flame in his poem ‘September 1, 1939’ (357) as the world prepared for war. We need it just as much now.

If we look to poets for anything at a time when abuse of power goes hand in hand with abuse of language, when the threat to language is an attack on our lifeblood, it should be for their vigilance in defending and continually revitalising the language, whether that be in the countries of the former Soviet bloc where such abuse was blatant, or in the West where it is more insidious.

Joseph Brodsky said the poet ‘shouldn’t be viewed through any other prism than that of his poems’, meaning that biography and politics come second. The reader engages not with the poet, but with the poem, experiencing the poem in its own terms. The Poem Itself was Stanley Burnshaw’s simple, resonant phrase for this (and the title of his celebrated anthology presenting word by word translations of 150 modern European poems).

W.B. Yeats wrote great poetry despite having a highly confused love life and muddled ideas drawn from a hotchpotch of philosophies, but you don’t go to poets for philosophical guidance any more than for models of good behaviour. One of the greatest disservices to poetry has been the modern tendency to read poems in terms of their paraphrasable meaning, leading to the misguided attempt to urge poets to speak out on political issues. These kinds of misreadings of poetry are the inevitable result of botched teaching: first the killing of poems by careless dissection at school, then their intellectual decoding as so-called texts in universities by literary theoreticians.

When Elizabeth Bishop taught at Harvard in the 1970s, she spurned the academic approach of New Criticism, insisting that poems should never be interpreted. Dana Gioia has described how her students would have to memorise a poem before talking about its meaning: ‘To her, the images and the music of the lines were primary. If we comprehended the sound, eventually we would understand the sense …She wanted us to see poems, not ideas. Poetry was the particular way the world could be talked about only in verse…the medium was the message. One did not interpret poetry, one experienced it. Showing us how to experience it clearly, intensely, and, above all, directly was the substance of her teaching. One did not need a sophisticated theory. One needed only intelligence, intuition, and a good dictionary.’

In these unreal times when so much feels hostile to everything we hold dear, poetry can seem irrelevant, as hard to defend as it is to define. What’s the point of poetry? people ask, or we ask ourselves. How can we spend time reading or writing poetry when humanity and civilisation are being trashed all around us? Aren’t we fiddling while Rome burns? And what is poetry anyway?

This book is an attempt to address all those difficult but necessary questions, though not necessarily to answer them. The comments by poets at the beginning of this introduction offer some possible responses, or at least clues. Seamus Heaney’s notion of the ‘redress of poetry’ is another helpful yardstick, and I would hope that there is much common ground between Heaney’s position and the poetry map of Staying Alive. You don’t go to poetry for answers or absolutes, just as you shouldn’t expect a psychotherapist to give you solutions to your problems, to make your decisions for you. But whether with a therapist or a trusted friend, dialogue helps you think and feel your way through difficulties or anxieties, leading to self-knowledge. A similar process is enacted, telescoped into three hours, in a Shakespeare play, when we witness how someone learns ‘to thine own self be true’, for then ‘Thou canst not then be false to any man.’

While Staying Alive includes many classic and timeless poems from the past hundred years, it’s primarily a book showing the wide range of contemporary poetry from the past three decades, much of which is closer to Shakespeare than to Modernism in its address to concerns shared by the reader and in the way the poet often celebrates human and spiritual values instead of mirroring cultural fragmentation. This is particularly true of major figures such as Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and the European writers they have championed, including Joseph Brodsky, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova and Miroslav Holub.

Poets no longer live in ivory towers, although there are a few still cocooned in academic isolation, especially in America. Today’s poets come from all kinds of backgrounds and cultures, women as well as men; they are much more tuned in to how people think about the world and feel about themselves than the poets of 50 years ago. What the best poets write is relevant to people’s lives and to their experience of the world, on an everyday as well as on a more spiritual level. Poetry includes not just the personal but the social, political and analytical; self-regard has given way to self-awareness.

In these unreal times,

Reviews for Staying Alive

[xleptodactylous · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

If anyone ever reviews the poems inside an anthology you should disregard it completely. I discovered my favourite poem within these pages, yet the entire collection was not to my taste. That is poetry.

[feastsandfestivals · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The perfect poetry anthology for the bedside table. This is a book to pick up for a few moments every day, there will be something to calm you or warm you or give you goosebumps. Staying Alive reminds you of one of the reasons that poetry exists - to capture that fleeting moment and pin it in your memory forever.

[debnance_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I saw this on a recommended book list (Best Books of the Decade, I think). It is a lovely collection of poems. Lots of my favorites here. I’m adding this book to my wishlist at Amazon when I turn this copy back into the library.

[keely_chace · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This fabulous anthology turned me on to several poets I hadn't read before. I enjoyed the broad range of poets and styles Astley includes, along with his thematic groupings, which give gentle order to the collection and help to make the whole more than the sum of its parts.

[telute · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very good anthology of modern poetry. Arranged by themes with introductory essays this is a superb introduction to poetry and a good anthology for those times when taking a whole shelf of volumes just isn't practical. Great for dipping into.

[crowyhead · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An amazing collection, truly worth its title."And the Days Are Not Full Enough"And the days are not full enoughAnd the nights are not full enoughAnd life slips by like a field mouseNot shaking the grass.- Ezra Pound