READERS of Ho wards End may recall Margaret Schlegel's view of railway termini: they are, she claimed, "our gates to the glorious and the unknown". It is a description to which all poetry anthologies should aspire and one which this new Heaney and Hughes compendium triumphantly deserves.
In the context of anthologies the notion of "the glorious" is tantalisingly problematic, especially at a time when cultural and literary assumptions underlying canonicity are increasingly questioned. The compilers here, according to a brief foreword by Heaney, had often to choose between personal preferences and "historical and canonical claims"; the resulting resolution affords an example of balancing which is frequently dizzying in its ingenuity and totally engaging in its execution.
Making this ingenuity and execution even more striking is the compilers' decision to adopt a one poem (or excerpt) per poet policy. But if this allows for marvellous variety in the almost three hundred selections it also provokes fascinating questions about omissions and inclusions. Fewer than twenty living poets are included (none of them Irish, translators apart), perhaps a consequence of the editors' desire to focus on poems "gathered on traditional bardic lines". This seems a fair inference to draw from Hughes's "afterword", a tightly argued statement of the pleasure of memorising poems, as distinct from learning them by rote.
It is possible to distinguish, in terms of the provenance of the poems, three principal strands. The first of these derives from what Heaney has elsewhere called "the civilised utterance from the classic canon of English poetry". This takes us, over some twelve centuries, from "The Dream of the Rood to the near contemporary world of Auden and Larkin, Bunting and Spender. Familiar as this strand may seem - at least to readers of a certain age and with a certain kind of literary education - it here refreshingly abandons the notion of male monopoly by which it was once characterised.
The second strand provides a particularly rich and generous representation of poetry from North America (and, to a lesser extent, from the Antipodes). Here, in Lowell's well known distinction, are poems "raw" and poems "cooked" which challenge us in their embrace of themes and styles of liberating openness. They necessitate a complete rethinking not simply of what poetry is but also of how it should read, demanding, all the way from Bradstreet to Ginsberg, a re tuning of the ear to different cadences and beats.
For many readers it will, however, be the volume's third strand which holds the greatest surprises. Forster's "unknown" starts here, in the form of translations which (in addition to bringing us Ovid, Virgil and Homer) give entry to the domain of Welsh, Scots Gaelic and, most of all, Irish language poetry: in these selections there ate haunting insights into a shared Celtic ancestry and its fluctuation between despair and exhilaration.
Where The Rattle Bag, the earlier Heaney and Hughes anthology, arranged material in alphabetical order according to titles or first lines, the poems here are more consciously grouped by theme. Accordingly, there are sequences to be found on, among many others, birth and death, childhood and age. But there are no group headings, no definitive signposts: poems weave in and out and readers - to return to Ho wards End - connect. The overall effect is of a powerful symphony which starts with a dramatic statement of intent ("That civilisation may not sink ..."), plays numerous variations on keys major and minor and ends with a note of calm optimism: "Tis well an old age is out./And time to begin a new." As Heaney sees it, it is less "carousel" and more "checklist". Some checklist!