Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy
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Ruth Stone (b. Roanoke, Virginia, 1915-2011) lived in rural Vermont for much of her life. After her husband’s suicide in 1959, she had to raise three daughters alone, all the time writing what she called her ‘love poems, all written to a dead man’ who forced her to ‘reside in limbo’ with her daughters. She only won wide recognition for her work in her late 80s, and was still writing poetry of extraordinary variety and radiance well into her 90s – fierce feminist and political poems and hilarious send-ups, meditations on ageing, love and loss.
Ruth Stone once said, ‘I decided very early on not to write like other people.’ Her late retrospective What Love Comes To (2008/2009) shows the fruits of this resolve in the lifetime’s work of a true American original, whose writing process was unlike anyone else’s: ‘I wrote my first poem without knowing I’d done it – and found that poems came with this mysterious feeling, a kind of peculiar ecstasy. I’d feel and hear a poem coming from a long way off, like a thunderous train of air. I’d feel it physically. I’d run like hell to the house, blindly groping for pencil and paper. And then the poem would write itself. I’d write it down from the inside out. The thing knew itself already. There were other times when I’d almost miss it, feeling it pass through me just as I was grabbing the pencil, but then I’d catch it by its tail and pull it backwards into my body. Then the poem came out backwards and I’d have to turn it round.’ [PBS Bulletin, 2009] ‘Second-Hand Coat’ [16].
Arundhathi Subramaniam (b. Bombay, 1967) is an Indian writer whose poems explore various ambivalences – around human intimacy with its bottlenecks and surprises, life in a Third World megalopolis, myth, the politics of culture and gender, and the persistent trope of the existential journey. ‘Prayer’ [120].
Anna T. Szabó is one of Hungary’s leading younger poets. Born in 1972 in Kolozsvár/Cluj-Napoca in Transylvania (Romania), she moved with her family to Hungary in 1987, later studying English and Hungarian literature at the University of Budapest and obtaining her PhD in English Renaissance literature. She published her first book of poems at the age of 23, and has since published several others as well as translations of writers such as James Joyce, Sylvia Plath, W.B. Yeats and John Updike. She is one of the key figures in George Szirtes’ anthology New Order: Hungarian Poets of the Post 1989 Generation (2010); her selection there includes ‘She Leaves Me’ [ 52].
Wislawa Szymborska (b. Bnin, Poland, 1923-2012) was one of Poland’s four great 20th-century poets. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996 ‘for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality’. Her mostly short poems are concerned with large existential issues, exploring the human condition with sceptical wit and ironic understatement. ‘Could Have’ [17].
Toon Tellegen was born in Brielle in the Netherlands in 1941. He is a leading Dutch poet as well as a novelist and children’s author, and worked as a GP until his recent retirement. His tragicomic poems convey human predicaments with great economy and vitality, often rendering them in the form of dramatic stories or dreamlike events, as in ‘I drew a line…’ [ 32].
R.S. Thomas (1913-2000) was one of the major poets of our time as well as one of the finest religious poets in the English language and Wales’s greatest poet. Born in Cardiff, he was an Anglican priest, an isolated figure who worked in only three rural parishes over a lifetime. Most of his poetry covers ground he treads repeatedly: man and God, science and nature, time and history, the land and people of Wales. ‘The Bright Field’ [73]. The winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011, Sweden’s
Tomas Tranströmer (b. Stockholm, 1931) is Scandinavia’s bestknown and most influential contemporary poet, and worked as a psychologist for 30 years. His poems are often explorations of the borderland between sleep and waking, between the conscious and unconscious states. Many use compressed description and concentrate on a single distinct image as a catalyst for psychological insight and metaphysical interpretation. This acts as a meeting-point or threshold between conflicting elements or forces: sea and land, man and nature, freedom and control, as in the poem included here, ‘Alone’ [ 36].
His translator Robin Fulton has noted how such images ‘leap out from the page, so that the first-time reader or listener has the feeling of being given something very tangible, at once’, which has made Tranströmer’s poetry amenable to translation into other languages. Fulton’s authoritative English translations of his work are published in Tranströmer’s New Collected Poems (1997/2011) in Britain, the American edition of which is titled The Great Enigma (2006).
Derek Walcott (b. St Lucia, 1930) is not only the foremost Caribbean poet writing today (as well as a dramatist and painter) but a major figure in world literature, recognised with the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992 ‘for a poetic œuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment’. Most of his work explores the Caribbean cultural experience, the history, landscape and lives of its multiracial people, fusing folk culture and oral tales with the classical, avant-garde and English literary tradition. ‘Love after Love’ [66].
James Wright (b. St Martin’s Ferry, Ohio, 1927-80) was one of the most influential American poets of the 20th century. Whether drawing on his native Ohio, the natural world, or the luminous resonant Italy of his later work, his powerful yet vulnerable voice embraces many facets of human experience through shifting tones and moods, both lyric and ironic, autobiographical and social. ‘Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota’ [24].
Adam Zagajewski was born in 1945 in Lwów (or Lvov), a largely Polish city that became part of the Soviet Ukraine shortly after his birth. His ethnic Polish family, who had lived for centuries in Lwów, were then forcibly repatriated to Poland. He came to prominence as a leading figure in Poland’s Generation of ’68 or Nowa Fala (New Wave), and was later active in the Solidarity movement. After living in France from 1982 and also teaching in the US, he now divides his time between Kraków and Chicago. His luminous, searching poems are imbued by a deep engagement with history, art, and life.
The New Yorker published Zagajewski’s ‘Try to Praise the Mutilated World’ [ 105] on its back page shortly after 11 September 2001. It was a recent poem, not written in response to the Al-Qaeda attacks but was viewed as such, being given such prominent publication at just that time, and certainly took on new resonance in the aftermath to 9/11. In an interview in Poets & Writers, Zagajewski said: ‘Don’t we use the word poetry in two ways? One: as a part of literature. Two: as a tiny part of the world, both human and pre-human, the part of beauty. So poetry as literature, as language, discovers within the world a layer that has existed unobserved in reality, and by doing so changes something in our life, expands somewhat the space of what we are. So yes, it has the power to restore the mutilated world, even if no statistics ever show it.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The poems in this anthology are reprinted from the following books, all by permission of the publishers listed unless stated otherwise. Thanks are due to all the copyright holders cited below for their kind permission:
Kim Addonizio: Tell Me (BOA Editions, USA, 2000). Agha Shahid Ali: The Half-Inch Himalayas (Wesleyan University Press, 1987). Yehuda Amichai: ‘The Place Where We Are Right’ and ‘A Man in His Life’ from The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, tr. Chana Bloch & Stephen Mitchell (HarperCollins, 1986; rev. ed. University of California Press, 1996), by permission of the University of California Press; ‘The Diameter of the Bomb’ from Selected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes & Daniel Weissbort (Faber & Faber, 2000). W.H. Auden: Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (Faber & Faber, 1991), by permission of Curtis Brown, New York.
Mourid Barghouti: Midnight and other poems, tr. Radwa Ashour (Arc, 2008). Elizabeth Bishop: Complete Poems 1927-1979 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel, by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. John Burnside: ‘Unwittingly’ fr
om The Light Trap (Jonathan Cape, 2002), part I of ‘Of Gravity and Light’, from The Light Trap (Jonathan Cape, 2002), by permission of the Random House Group Ltd.
Edip Cansever: Dirty August, tr. Julia Clare Tillinghast & Richard Tillinghast (Talisman House, USA, 2009), by permission of the translators. Raymond Carver: All of Us: Collected Poems (Harvill Press, 1996), by permission by permission of Random House Group Ltd, copyright © 1996 Tess Gallagher. Nina Cassian: Life Sentence: Selected Poems, ed. William Jay Smith (Anvil Press Poetry, 1990). Charles Causley: Collected Poems 1951-2000 (Picador, 2000), by permission of David Higham Associates Ltd. C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems, revised edition, tr. Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard (Chatto & Windus, 1998). Julius Chingono: ‘As I Go’, from Poetry International Web (Zimbabwe Domain, 2008, by permission of Poetry International on behalf of the estate of Julius Chingono. Kate Clanchy: Newborn (Picador, 2004), by permission of Macmillan Publishers Ltd. Michael Coady: Two for a Woman, Three for a Man (1980) by kind permission of Michael Coady and the Gallery Press, Loughcrew, Oldcastle, Co. Meath, Ireland. David Constantine: Collected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2004).
Imtiaz Dharker: I Speak for the Devil (Bloodaxe Books, 2001). Michael Donaghy: Collected Poems (Picador, 2009), by permission of Macmillan Publishers Ltd. Mark Doty: Atlantis (Jonathan Cape, 1996), by permission of the Random House Group Ltd. Rita Dove: On the Bus with Rosa Parkes (W.W. Norton & Company, 1999). Alan Dugan: Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry (Seven Stories Press, NY, 2001). Helen Dunmore: Out of the Blue: Poems 1975-2001 (Bloodaxe Books, 2001). Stephen Dunn: Between Angels (W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1989).
T.S. Eliot: The Complete Poems and Plays (Faber & Faber, 1969).
U.A. Fanthorpe: New & Collected Poems (Enitharmon Press, 2010). Robert Frost: The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (Jonathan Cape, 1967), by permission of Random House Group Ltd.
Jack Gilbert: Transgressions: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2006). Dana Gioia: Daily Horoscope (Graywolf Press, 1986). Lars Gustafsson: A Time in Xanadu, tr. John Irons (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), www.coppercanyonpress.org.
Kerry Hardie: ‘Sheep Fair Day’ from Selected Poems (Gallery Press/Bloodaxe Books, 2011), reprinted from The Sky Didn’t Fall (Gallery Press, 2003), by permission of The Gallery Press. Seamus Heaney: Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996 (Faber & Faber, 1998). Geoffrey Hill: Collected Poems (Penguin, 1985). Nâzim Hikmet: Poems of Nâzim Hikmet, tr. Randy Blasing & Mutlu Konuk (Persea Books, Inc, NY, 1994; second edition, 2002). Jane Hirshfield: ‘The Weighing’ from Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2005); ‘Burlap Sack’ from After (Bloodaxe Books, 2006). Miroslav Holub: Poems Before & After: Collected English Translations, second edition (Bloodaxe Books, 2006). Langston Hughes: The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, 1994), by permission of David Higham Associates.
Mohja Kahf: E-mails from Scheherazad (University of Florida Press, 2003). Jaan Kaplinski: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2011). Doris Kareva: Shape of Time, tr. Tiina Aleman (Arc, 2010). Jackie Kay: Darling: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2007). Brendan Kennelly: Familiar Strangers: New & Selected Poems 1960-2004 (Bloodaxe Books, 2004). Jane Kenyon: Let Evening Come: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2005), copyright © 2005 Estate of Jane Kenyon, from Collected Poems, by permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, www.graywolf press.org. Galway Kinnell: Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin, USA, 2000; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2001). Stanley Kunitz: Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected (W.W. Norton & Company, 1995).
Philip Larkin: Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (Faber & Faber, 1990). Li-Young Lee: ‘From Blossoms’ from From Blossoms: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2007), reprinted from Rose (BOA Editions, USA, 1986). Denise Levertov: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2003). Philip Levine: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2006), by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and Random House, Inc. Michael Longley: Collected Poems (Jonathan Cape, 2006), by permission of the Random House Group Ltd. Thomas Lux: New and Selected Poems 1975-1995 (Houghton Mifflin, 1997), by permission of the author.
Norman MacCaig: The Poems of Norman MacCaig, ed. Ewen McCaig (Polygon/Birlinn, 2009). Louis MacNeice: Collected Poems, ed. Peter McDonald (Faber, 2007), by permission of David Higham Associates Ltd. Derek Mahon: New Collected Poems (Gallery Press, 2011). Czesław Miłosz: New & Collected Poems 1931-2001 (Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 2001), copyright © Czesław Miłosz Royalties Inc., 1988, 1991, 1995, 2001. Edwin Morgan: Collected Poems (Carcanet Press, 1996). Les Murray: New Collected Poems (Carcanet Press, 2003).
Pablo Neruda: ‘Sweetness, Always’ from Extravagaria, tr. Alastair Reid (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974), by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Alden Nowlan: Between Tears and Laughter: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2004), by permission of the House of Anansi, Toronto, and the Estate of Alden Nowlan. Naomi Shihab Nye: ‘Kindness’ from Tender Spot: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008), reprinted from Words under the Words: Selected Poems (Far Corner Books, USA, 1995).
Dennis O’Driscoll: New and Selected Poems (Anvil Press Poetry, 2004). Sharon Olds: Selected Poems (Jonathan Cape, 2005), by permission of the Random House Group Ltd. Mary Oliver: Dream Work (Grove/Atlantic, 1986), by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc., and the author. Alice Oswald: The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (Oxford University Press, 1996), by permission of United Agents and the author.
Fernando Pessoa: A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems, tr. Richard Zenith (Penguin Books, 2006). Rainer Maria Rilke: ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’ from Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. & tr. Stephen Mitchell (The Modern Library, New York, 1995), copyright © 1995 Stephen Mitchell, by permission of Modern Library a division of Random House, Inc. Rumi: The Essential Rumi: Translations by Coleman Barks (HarperSanFrancisco, USA, 1995; expanded edition, 2004), copyright in both volumes © Coleman Barks, also by kind permission of the Reid Boates Literary Agency.
Gjertrud Schnackenberg: Supernatural Love: Poems 1976-2000 (Bloodaxe Books, 2001). Ken Smith: The Poet Reclining: Selected Poems 1962-1980 (Bloodaxe Books, 1982). William Stafford: The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 1998), by permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, www.graywolfpress.org. Anne Stevenson: Poems 1955-2005 (Bloodaxe Books, 2005). Ruth Stone: What Love Comes To: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2009). Arundhathi Subramaniam: Where I Live: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2009). Anna T. Szabó: ‘She Leaves Me’, tr. Clive Wilmer & George Gömöri, from New Order: Hungarian Poets of the Post 1989 Generation, ed. George Szirtes (Arc, 2010). Wisława Szymborska: Poems New & Collected, tr. Stanisław Baranczak & Clare Cavanagh (Faber & Faber, 1999).
Toon Tellegen: About Love and About Nothing Else, tr. Judith Wilkinson (Shoestring Press, 2008). R.S. Thomas: Collected Poems 1945-1990, by permission of J.M. Dent & Sons, a division of the Orion Publishing Group Ltd, and Gwydion Thomas. Tomas Tranströmer: New Collected Poems, tr. Robin Fulton (Bloodaxe Books, 1997/2011).
Derek Walcott: Collected Poems 1948-1984 (Faber & Faber, 1986). James Wright: Above the River: Complete Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 1992), by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
Adam Zagajewski: Without End: New and Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002), by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders of the poems published in this book. The editor and publisher apologise if any material has been included without permission or without the appropriate acknowledgement, and would be glad to be told of anyone who has not been consulted.
INDEX OF WRITERS
Kim Addonizio 60, 61
Agha Shahid Ali 73
Yehuda Amichai 88, 100, 101
W.H. Auden 98, 115
Mourid Barghouti 96
Elizabeth Bishop 38, 93
John Burnside 44, 72
Edip Cansever 15
Raymond Carver 119, 124
Nina Cassian 25
Charles Causley 118
Julius Chingono 27
Kate Clanchy 50
Michael Coady 107
David Constantine 114
Imtiaz Dharker 109
Michael Donaghy 86
Mark Doty 34
Rita Dove 18
Alan Dugan 63
Helen Dunmore 58
Stephen Dunn 106
T.S. Eliot 74, 121
U.A. Fanthorpe 62
Robert Frost 31, 33
Jack Gilbert 97
Dana Gioia 94
Lars Gustafsson 45
Kerry Hardie 70
Seamus Heaney 48, 124
Nâzim Hikmet 108
Geoffrey Hill 102
Jane Hirshfield 95, 96
Miroslav Holub 19, 98
Langston Hughes 21
Mohja Kahf 109
Jaan Kaplinski 87
Doris Kareva 12
Jackie Kay 117
Brendan Kennelly 26
Jane Kenyon 20, 84
Galway Kinnell 54
Stanley Kunitz 29
Philip Larkin 64, 112
Li-Young Lee 80
Denise Levertov 14, 79
Philip Levine 47, 81