by Neil Astley
Many of poems in the Staying Alive trilogy celebrate the joy of living, the beauty of the natural world and the pleasures of the body and the senses. Denise Levertov’s ‘Living’ [ 14] captures the vitality of nature and the preciousness of every life and every minute of life, while ‘O Taste and See’ [ 79] tells how the world ‘is not with us enough’, urging us to connect with ‘all that lives’ through all our senses.
Philip Levine (b. Detroit, 1928) is an American poet of Russian-Jewish immigrant stock viewed by many as the authentic voice of America’s urban poor. Born and raised in Detroit, he spent his early years doing a succession of heavy labouring jobs. He taught for over 30 years at California State University, Fresno, and was US Poet Laureate in 2011-12. Much of his poetry addresses the joys and sufferings of industrial life, with radiant feeling as well as painful irony. Always a poet of memory and invention, Levine has continually written poems which search for universal truths. His plain-speaking poetry is a testament to the durability of love, the strength of the human spirit and the persistence of life in the face of death. His books include 17 collections of poetry, two books of essays and his recent UK selection, Stranger to Nothing: Selected Poems (2006). ‘Starlight’ [47], ‘The Simple Truth’ [81].
Michael Longley (b. Belfast, 1939) is an Irish poet of English parentage who has spent most of his life in Belfast and at his second home at Carrigskeewan on the coast of Co. Mayo. A dedicated naturalist, he studied Classics at Trinity College Dublin, and worked for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland from 1970 to 1991. Longley’s poetry is formally inventive and precisely observed, spanning and blending love poetry, war poetry, nature poetry, elegies, satires, verse epistles, art and the art of poetry. He has extended the capacity of the lyric to absorb dark matter: the Great War, the Holocaust, the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’; and his translations from classical poets speak to contemporary issues. ‘All of These People’ [103].
Thomas Lux (b. Northampton, Massachusetts, 1946) grew up on his family’s dairy farm, later becoming an acclaimed university teacher and writer. After starting out as a Neo-surrealist poet in the 1970s, he ‘drifted away from Surrealism and the arbitrariness of that. I got more interested in subjects, identifiable subjects other than my own angst or ennui or things like that. I paid more and more attention to the craft. Making poems rhythmical and musical and believable as human speech and as distilled and tight as possible is very important to me.’ [Cortland Review interview, 1999] That distillation is clearly evident in ‘A Little Tooth’ [ 53], which pans through a whole life in nine tightly rhymed lines.
Norman MacCaig (b. Edinburgh, 1910-96) always lived in Edinburgh but had family links with the island of Scalpay and often visited Assynt in Sutherland, the setting of his Highlands poems. He worked as a schoolteacher for 30 years, and was a central figure in Edinburgh’s often fractious postwar literary set. Mac-Caig studied Classics at Edinburgh University, a strong formal influence behind the precision and lucidity of the poetry he wrote after shaking off the ‘Apocalyptic’ style of 1940s poetry. The surprising metaphorical conceits which were the hallmark of much of his mature poetry predated the less inventive contrivances of the English ‘Martian poets’ of the 1980s by decades. ‘The Red and the Black’ [104], ‘Memorial’ [116].
Louis MacNeice (1907-63) was born in Belfast, the son of a rector (later a bishop), and educated in England. He worked as a BBC writer-producer for 20 years, and died from pneumonia after going down pot-holes to record sound effects for a radio play. Somewhat overshadowed by his friend W.H. Auden during the 1930s, MacNeice is the quintessential poet of flux, openness and possibilities. Many of his poems defend individual freedom and tolerance, and kick against conformism and restrictive ideologies. In ‘Snow’ [ 41], he writes that: ‘World is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion / A tangerine and spit the pips and feel / The drunkenness of things being various.’ In ‘Entirely’ [ 89], written over half a century ago when the threat was from fascism or communism, MacNeice opposes the fundamentalist view of the world as ‘black or white entirely’, seeing life as ‘a mad weir of tigerish waters / A prism of delight and pain’, which is very much the world view expressed by many different writers throughout the Staying Alive trilogy, not just in poems on global or social issues but in highly personal love poems, meditations and elegies.
Derek Mahon (b. Belfast, 1941) is the most formally accomplished Irish poet of a generation including Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley. His early influences included Yeats, MacNeice and Beckett along with the French poets he has continued to translate. Mahon’s ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’ [ 42] is one of the great poems of the 20th century. It doesn’t just make you pause for thought as you read and re-read it, it almost makes you feel more human. The poem’s evolving interplay between thought and feeling – enacted through its engagement with language – produces a delicately balanced response in the reader. Those particular sensations of sound and symbol evoked by this poem trouble the meaning, but you shouldn’t expect to understand any poem at one reading. Just as you listen to songs – or sing them – again and again, so poems need to be read, re-read, read out loud and read again. Of all the poems in this anthology, the ones which I feel give the most with each re-reading are those by Derek Mahon, Elizabeth Bishop, Geoffrey Hill and T.S. Eliot.
The mushrooms in Mahon’s ‘Disused Shed’ have been waiting in the dark ‘since civil war days’. Their presence is symbolic, standing for all the marginalised people and mute victims of history. Charged with meaning and remembrance by the poem, this forgotten shed behind the rhododendrons is an imagined lost world (‘one of those places where a thought might grow’) remembered from Troubles (1970), a novel set just after the First World War in the decaying Majestic Hotel in rural Ireland by J.G. Farrell, to whom the poem is dedicated (Mahon’s friend was a polio victim, and died in Ireland in a drowning accident not long after the poem was written). Written during the Irish ‘Troubles’ in the 1970s, the poem is both timeless and timely, as Seamus Deane points out: ‘It is a poem that heartbreakingly dwells on and gives voice to all those peoples and civilisations that have been lost and/or destroyed. Since it is set in Ireland, with all the characteristics of an Irish “Big House” ruin, it speaks with a special sharpness to the present moment and the fear, rampant in Northern Ireland, of communities that fear they too might perish and be lost, with none to speak for them.’
Mahon’s poem achieves its remarkable effects through sound, beginning with a mellifluous evocation through consonance and assonance of fading sounds in the first stanza, through which the first sentence unspools to the metre like a rollcall, with a breath-jump across the stanza gap at the end of line 10, not meeting the first full-stop until the end of the 13th line of the poem, at the light-giving keyhole. Edna Longley’s close reading of this poem shows how from this point ‘rhythms expressive of the mushrooms crowding to the poem’s keyhole, of growth and accumulation, answer those of diminuendo’, and also how complementary rhythms trace the ‘posture’ of ‘expectancy’ and ‘desire’ asserted in the narrative. The ten-line stanzas which Mahon handles with such delicacy and consummate skill are “big houses” of his own building indebted to past models, to his formal masters W.B. Yeats and Louis MacNeice.
Czesław Miłosz (b. Lithuania, 1911-2004) was Poland’s foremost modern poet, often described as a poet of memory and witness. Born in Lithuania (then ruled by Tsarist Russia), he worked for underground presses in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, later becoming a diplomat and given political asylum in France in 1951. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980. ‘Encounter’ [38], ‘A Confession’ [78].
Edwin Morgan (b. Glasgow, 1920-2010) was not only one of the foremost Scottish poets of the 20th century but also one of the most versatile English-language poets and translators of any period, an intellectual polymath with a relish for both traditional forms and for concrete or sound poetry. The vitality and breadth of his work owes much to his voracio
us appetite for life and literature, his immersion in Russian, French and many other languages, his engagement with art, film, science and science fiction, and his belief that ‘you can write poetry about anything. You really can! The world, history, society, everything in it, pleads to become a voice, voices’. ‘Strawberries’ [59], ‘Trio’ [85].
Les Murray (b. Nabiac, NSW, 1938) is Australia’s best-known poet, a prolific and popular but controversial writer. Encompassing all Australian life – including the natural world – his poetry is dramatic and highly engaging, enlivened by humour and self-mockery, plain-speaking but also complex. While wedded to traditional verse, he is an inventive and exuberant poet: invigorating the ballad form, ‘translating’ voices from nature into poetry, imitating Aboriginal songs. Like America’s Walt Whitman he champions his own ‘vernacular republic’, but his critics accuse him of blinkered nationalism and reactionary rural conservatism.
Murray’s poem ‘An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow’ [ 90] is about not being afraid to show our emotions: giving physical expression to the way we feel, here by crying in public. There’s also a sense of mystery in this: no one knows why the man is crying, and Murray evokes the baffled, communal response to a spectacle both ordinary and extraordinary by echoing a famous poem by ‘Waltzing Matilda’ author ‘Banjo’ Paterson in his opening lines. Every Australian of Murray’s generation would know by heart ‘The Man from Snowy River’ which begins: ‘There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around / That the colt from old Regret had got away’, but instead of bushmen from different cattle-stations, Murray homes in on men reacting from familiar Sydney locations, drinking or eating in Repins and Lorenzinis, or watching the horse sales at Tattersalls.
Pablo Neruda (b. Parral, Chile, 1904-73), known in Chile as ‘the people’s poet’, was one of the greatest and most influential poets of the 20th century, and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. He served his country as a diplomat for many years, but also spent long periods in exile. His poetry embraces both private and public concerns: he is known both for his love and nature poetry and for works addressing Latin American political history and social struggle. His early poetry was fiercely surreal, reflecting ancient terrors, modern anxieties and his near-religious desolation. The Spanish Civil War changed his life and work as he moved to a personal voice and to more politically involved and ideological positions.
The turning-point came with his epic volume Canto general (1950), including ‘The Heights of Macchu Picchu’, which marked ‘a new stage in my style and a new direction in my concerns’. Standing on the hallowed Inca ground, Neruda vowed to make the stones speak on behalf of those who had built and laboured on it. What had begun as a poem about Chile turned into one that expressed the whole geological, natural and political history of South America.
His later work was elemental in its concerns, including the three books of Odes, which gave material things a life of their own. Nothing was ordinary in Neruda’s poetry: anything could be magical; womanhood was linked to the regeneration of earth and the cyclical processes of nature. ‘Sweetness, Always’ [82].
Alden Nowlan (b. Nova Scotia, 1933-83) is Canada’s most popular modern poet, widely celebrated for his heart-warming, plain-speaking poems. Born in the Nova Scotia backwoods, he left school at 12 and worked in a sawmill before becoming a local newspaper reporter. His early poems bear witness to the harshness and hypocrisy of lives brutalised by poverty and ignorance in a remote Canadian backwater. But as Nowlan finds love and lifelong friendship, so his work achieves authority and lasting warmth. His poems present universal portrayals of human life: teasingly ironic, wryly humorous, sympathetic, quizzical and morally astute. ‘Great Things Have Happened’ [55].
Naomi Shihab Nye (b. St Louis, Missouri, 1952) is an American writer, anthologist, educator and ‘wandering poet’. Born to a Palestinian father and an American mother, she has published over 20 books. She gives voice to her experience as an Arab-American through poems about heritage and peace that overflow with a humanitarian spirit. Through her empathetic use of poetic language, she reveals the shining nature of our daily lives, whether writing about local life in her inner-city Texan neighbourhood or the daily rituals of Jews and Palestinians in the war-torn Middle East. ‘Kindness’ [91].
Dennis O’Driscoll (b. Co. Tipperary, 1954) is an Irish poet, critic and anthologist who has worked as a civil servant since the age of 16. He is a poet of humanity whose wittily observant poetry is attuned to the tragedies and comedies of contemporary life. ‘Missing God’ [67].
Sharon Olds (b. San Francisco, 1942) is an American poet noted for the candour and brutal honesty of her unflinching poems about love, sex, women and difficult family relationships, but she distinguishes her ‘apparently personal poetry’ from that of the Confessional poets: ‘I have an old-fashioned vision of the word confession. I believe that a confession is a telling, publicly or privately, of a wrong that one has done, which one regrets. And the confession is a way of trying to get to the other side and change one’s nature. So I have written two or three confessional poems. I would use the phrase apparently personal poetry for the kind of poetry that I think people are referring to as “confessional”. Apparently personal because how do we really know? We don’t.’ [Poets & Writers Magazine, 1993] ‘This Hour’ [56].
Mary Oliver (b. Ohio, 1935) is America’s most popular contemporary poet. Her luminous poetry celebrates nature and beauty, love and the spirit, silence and wonder, extending the visionary American tradition of Whitman, Emerson and Emily Dickinson. It is nourished by her intimate knowledge and minute daily observation of the New England coast around Cape Cod, its woods and ponds, its birds, animals, plants and trees. ‘Wild Geese’ [11], ‘The Journey’ [22].
Alice Oswald (b. England, 1966) is probably the most distinctively individual English poet of her generation. Trained as a classicist, she later worked as a gardener, and now lives in Devon. Her poetry is highly musical, often concerned with the natural world, drawing on the English oral tradition and oral history as well as on Homer and Greek mythology. Since Dart (2002), each of her books has differed greatly from its predecessor, being conceived as a coherent work of imagination, complete in itself and a powerful testament to the importance of its subject. ‘Wedding’ [64].
Fernando Pessoa (b. Lisbon, 1888-1935) lived in Lisbon for most of his life, and died in obscurity there, but is now recognised as one of the most innovative and radical literary figures in modern poetry. He wrote under numerous “heteronyms”, literary alter egos with their own identities and writing styles, who supported and criticised each other in the literary journals. The poem here [ 14] was published by Pessoa as an ode by Ricardo Reis.
Rainer Maria Rilke (b. Prague, 1875-1926) was one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. His poetry addresses questions of how to live and relate to the world in a voice that is simultaneously prophetic and intensely personal. Most of his major work was written in German, including the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus. Born in Prague, he lived in France from 1902 and then Switzerland from 1919 until his death. ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’ [22].
Jelaluddin Rumi (b. Wakhsh, Persia, 1207-73) was a Sufi mystic and poet, born in what is now Tajikistan, who founded the ecstatic dancing order known as the Mevlevi or Whirling Dervishes. Rumi would recite his poems in any place, sometimes day and night for several days, with his disciple Husam writing them down. ‘The Guest House’ [13]. See also Coleman Barks.
Gjertrud Schnackenberg (b. Tacoma, Washington, 1953) is a American poet known for the sensuous richness of her imaginatively daring poetry of ideas and ‘her stunning command of prosody’ (Eliza Griswold). She has published four collections featuring extended sequences relating to history, art, literature, myth, philosophy and human suffering, and two book-length sequences, The Throne of Labdacus (2000), and Heavenly Questions (2010/2011), a setting of six long poems of passion, mourning and redemption. ‘Snow Melting’ [57].
Ken Smith (
b. Rudston, Yorkshire, 1938-2002) was an English poet whose work and example inspired a whole generation of younger poets. His poetry shifted territory with time, from rural Yorkshire, America and London to the war-ravaged Balkans and Eastern Europe (before and after Communism). His early books span a transition from a preoccupation with land and myth to his later engagement with urban Britain and the politics of radical disaffection. Smith grew up in the North Riding of Yorkshire, the son of an itinerant farm labourer, and his poem ‘Being the third song of Urias’ [ 46] is written from both these perspectives, evoking the boy back in the raw landscape of his childhood as well as the grown-up man looking back at his life, examining his feelings of separation from the inarticulate, unloving father he sought to understand in this and other poems.
William Stafford (b. Kansas, 1914-93) was an American poet who published his first collection at the age of 48. His contemplative poetry celebrates human virtues and universal mysteries, with nature, war, technology and Native American people as his abiding themes. In a typical Stafford poem he seeks an almost sacred place in the wilderness untouched by man, finding meaning in the quest itself and its implications. ‘The Way It Is’ [32].
Anne Stevenson (b. Cambridge, England, 1933) is an American and British poet, born in Cambridge of American parents, who grew up in the States but has lived in Britain for most of her adult life. Rooted in close observation of the world and acute psychological insight, her poems continually question how we see and think about the world. They are incisive as well as entertaining, marrying critical rigour with personal feeling, and a sharp wit with an original brand of serious humour. ‘Poem for a Daughter’ [49], ‘The Victory’ [51].