The Birth Of The Book

The idea of a living poet putting together a Collected Poems is generally considered to be an overwhelmingly dodgy project - a little like building one's own coffin, digging one's own grave and carving one's own tombstone all rolled into one. The idea of a living poet putting together a Selected Poems is generally considered to be only marginally less dicey.

I was determined, so, when I began to think of putting together this book, that it should not appear as one of those tombstone tomes - solemn, sturdy, stolidly self-satisfied - but an altogether more freewheeling enterprise. I was determined that it would be a short book, with no more than 10 or 12 poems from each of seven or eight collections, and that it should have a free-standing quality, by which I mean that I wanted this book to present a coherent, if partial, account of my work over the past 30 years, with its own narrative arc.

I also wanted this to be a book which would have an unexpected feel even to those people who might have read my poems in their original context. I myself don't spend a lot of time reading my own poems, so it was with an almost innocent eye that I began to read. I should write `speed read', for I spent no more than a day on the entire project. The list of contents of a Selected Poems is, after all, something over which one might fret for weeks, months, years even, or simply dispatch in a few hours. I chose to present the poems not in the order in which they appeared in my main volumes but in the order in which they appeared in small press pamphlets and limited editions, ranging from my first pamphlet, Knowing My Place (1971) through numerous publications with the Gallery Press to the limited edition of Incantata (1994).

One effect of this was that I began to make connections between poems that hadn't previously struck me, finding myself preparing the way for "Incantata" by including a group of poems from The Wishbone that now seemed to have a relevance and a resonance that would otherwise have been lost on me. I also found myself favouring a particular line through the poems, the more accessible lyric over the sometimes more difficult extended narratives that I've written over the years. The fact, by the way, that I include almost nothing of such long poems as "Madoc: A Mystery" or "Yarrow" should not be construed as a rejection of them, however much some would like to believe that. I just happen to be in a predominantly lyric mode at the moment, partly as a result in an increasing interest in music theatre, which is why I include three pieces from my opera libretto, Shining Brow.

In that sense, I hope this book will be read not as a coffin-plate, not even as a milestone, but as a signpost towards the more recent work included in my new collection, Hay, which will be published by Faber and Faber in October 1998.