reviews of books of poetry. of course.
previous latest addition here.
i binge irregularly on poetry, only reading it every few years or so, when i stumble across a cut-price book. this is foolish, because i enjoy reading it easily as much as expensive tomes on computing, but perhaps some internal self-regulatory process is at work: if i continued to read as much poetry as i have over the last 24 hours i think my head would explode.
the school bag is an attempt at the definitive poetry list, the stuff that, if not instantly recognisable, forms the backbone of our - my, at least - spoken culture.
the best work in british languages (translated to english) ever? - dangerous, potent, heady stuff.
faced with such a collection it's difficult to know where to start, or what to say. i can only comment on peripheral issues - the works themselves are, if not above question, out of my league.
on the back cover the order of the poems is praised. they are not placed by date, but by common themes. at first, i found this jarred - sometimes the links were (like a too-smooth disk jockey on local radio) gratingly obvious: after a work by thomas moore, a poem referring not just to moore, but to the preceding poem (a glancing reference, perhaps not even present, but forced into stark relief by the editing); after an excerpt from shakespeare, a work inspired by the excerpt; worse still the change in gear from the pain and angst of eliot's hollow men, rosenberg's break of day in the trenches, through hewitt's the king's horses, to jolly ditties about cute animals!
but the ordering serves a purpose. after empson's let it go there's a 16th/17th century discussion of a headache. for me, let it go talks about despair and loneliness (student's angst - it was pinned on my door at college), and i was beginning to wonder whether the older (much less familiar) works had anything important to say to me. so i turned to yeats's awesome long-legged fly, which opens the book, and after it found three brilliant jewels - one 6th century, one 19th and one 20th - which developed different parts of that scrutiny of the genius, madness, personal and political, of civilisation and culture, and pulled 1400 years together. returning to let it go, with new-found respect for the editors, i discovered that both it and the subsequent ode to a headache could well be discussing writing poetry, the gap before creation (which, in turn, recalls to mind the hollow men...).
whether a connection is obvious, as i should have remembered from playing the hip bone game, and whether the obvious connection is the line being drawn, are subjective questions - blatant signposts are sometimes needed, and, when not, may be the result of misreading a more complex relationship.
what else? with an anthology like this, and a reader as lax as i am, there's bound to be many new discoveries. elizabeth 1 changed herself in my view; oscar wilde's ballad of reading gaol is brilliant - did it really have to be edited?; the old stuff honestly is as good as the new (apart from the change in language, and maybe a tend to being more cryptic or contradictory (owen and eliot - who, to me, are both powerful and difficult) - there's been less change than i expected over the years. perhaps my view is clouded by modern translations that hang fancy new clothes on older, more traditional bones.
omissions? it seems plain silly to find nothing by the two editors. sassoon isn't there (maybe, when i think about this, i can see why - and realise that the regeneration trilogy has given me a crooked view). keeping to the single poem per poet rule has kept out, for example, yeats's second coming.
anyone know where, in another year or two, i can buy the rattle bag on the cheap?