This is a mighty book in more ways than one. It weighs in at just over 1,000 pages, spanning the ubiquitous Anon of circa 1300 towards 1994, almost 700 years of verse in English, no less. But the real beef is in Paul Keegan's editorial principle, a departure from his predecessor, John Hayward, whose essential and many-times-reprinted Penguin anthology of 1956 kicked off with Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) and concluded with Dylan Thomas. Keegan's New Penguin Book . . . seeks "to restore to poems their places in the history of reading". In other words, the anthology is "arranged by poem rather than by poet, with each poem entering the sequence according to the date of its first appearance". This sounds somewhat fussy, but in effect Keegan has created a fascinating idea of order, an anthological fusion if you like, of how poems surface and play off one another in the actual flow of recorded time. Indeed the one thing that struck this reader in, for instance, the run-up to the first World War is how Rupert Brooke leads into Isaac Rosenberg, against which Lawrence and Yeats stand alone, with their own obsessions, yet all "of the one time".
Or, to take another instance more or less at random, the 1950s, that so-called era of austerity, produces some great lyrics of the last century all in the space of a few years: "Do not go gentle into that good night" (Thomas), "The Fall of Rome" and "The Shield of Achilles" (Auden), "The Wound" (Gunn), "At Grass" (Larkin), "Thought Fox" (Hughes), "House on a cliff" (MacNeice) and "Not waving but drowning" (Smith) to mention but a few contemporaneous poems. The decision to include Americans Pound, Eliot and Plath but dispense with Stevens, Carlos Williams, Moore, Jeffers, Crowe Ransom, Hart Crane and e.e. cummings from Hayward's anthology is not really clear. It is a pity that two of the Irish poets' names are incorrectly cited, but these are really quibbles. Pick up this glorious book at, say, the 1620s and there you will find Ben Jonson, John Donne and Drummond of Hawthorden strutting their stuff. Fast-forward to the early 1970s, when the Irish - or some thereof - start to move in: Boland, Carson, Ni Chuilleanain, Clarke, Ni Dhomnhaill, Durcan, Heaney, Kinsella, Longley, Mahon, Montague, Muldoon and Paulin. In stark contrast, distinctly English poets such as John Heath Stubbs, Gavin Ewart, Patricia Beer, Elizabeth Jennings, George Barker or Andrew Motion don't get a look-in. Along the way there are some surprising treats: in 1962 Malcolm Lowry's "Strange Type" or Samuel Beckett's four-liner from 1946, "Saint Lo":
Vire will wind in other shadows unborn through the bright ways tremble and the old mind ghost-forsaken sink into its havoc.
If it is actually impossible to hear or see in the verse any dominant continuity (or continuities) throughout so many centuries of an ever-changing language (and it is impossible), one overall impression did occur to me at a weak moment. And it is this: just how much of the verse sings of the real world, the historical world as well as the lived world of the emotional life, and of how little is preoccupied with our ways of seeing said world. A grand book such as this impels the reader to generalise, and why not? It is an anthology of poems, first and foremost. Every house in the land should own The New Penguin for wet Sunday afternoons, for languid summers, for dark winter nights. This is a book to have about the place for good. As Ben Jonson would have it, "sing high and aloofe/safe from the wolves black jaw, and the dull Asses hoofe"; or, as we might say, this is the business.
Gerald Dawe teaches at Trinity College, Dublin. His collections of poetry include The Morning Train. A volume of his selected essays, Stray Dogs and Dark Horses, appeared last year