`This book offers many kinds of enjoyment." That is the first sentence of Simon Armitage and Robert Crawford's introduction to The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland Since 1945 (Penguin, £10.99 in UK), and as they begin so they go on, presumptuous and comic, like Mutt and Jeff. "It is the first anthology to survey the poetry from Britain and Ireland which was published in the half-century after the Second World War." I thought this was a clue in a crossword until I realised that there probably hasn't been such an anthology published since 1995.
"In an age of electronic communications and information overload, the niftiness, attentiveness and numinous vibrancy of poetry have become more, not less, important." Because of electronic communications poetry has become more important? That is nifty.
"Poetry is language which delivers its own promise, and which may often trip reader and writer beyond the expected, into an otherworld potent with spiritual experience." Delivering promises into an otherworld (not, mind, an other world) is freaky enough, but tripping beyond, well, that's far out.
Next two sentences: "It is poetry's power which makes it for some people embarrassing and unconfinable. Yet almost everyone has written a poem at some time, and has known poetry as intimately important - a source of delight, nurture and illumination that need not always be po-faced." This tremendous thing is blush-making and no jail is big enough to hold it, but you've done it yourself betimes and found it not just important, but intimately so (like hygienic products), and it only has to be po-faced some of the time.
All of this comes from the first paragraph. It ends thus: "Arguments about what is `British', what is `English', or `Irish', or `Welsh', or `Scottish' run through the period and sometimes energize its poetry, but the existence of the two geographical entities, Britain and Ireland, and their mutual awareness, remains throughout unarguable." According to Herr Godel, in any system of axioms there will always be propositions that are undecidable on the basis of those axioms, and though he was talking maths I don't see why his logic shouldn't be applied to islands, especially islands with Armitage and Crawford on them.
The thesis these sloppy drivellers (both university teachers) put forward is, if such can be imagined, vaguer and mushier than their prose. Roughly speaking, it claims that the second World War caused a fissure in the writing of poetry. "Before [the war], Irish verse is dominated by Yeats . . . in Britain, the brilliant, highly educated poetry of Eliot and Auden held sway." Then, "Yeats died in 1939, Eliot slipped away towards the theatre . . . [and] Auden grew less telegraphically compressed, less "coded", more relaxed . . . The democratic voice was arriving."
This paltry historicism is only slightly less absurd than the offered qualifications for exceptions: "the biblioholically (sic) demanding late (sic) poetry of the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid (mostly written in the 1930s), the ambitious and Eliot-supported myth-manoeuvrings (sic) of Welsh man David Jones, and the Pound-sponsored northern English modernist poetry of Basil Bunting" seem "something of an isolated, if exciting, outcrop in the post-war geography".
In the post-war period "poets as diverse as Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes and Stevie Smith wrote subtle, accessible and surprising poetry, communicating more directly with a wider public: "Piggy to Joey,/Piggy to Joe,/Yes, that's what I was -/Piggy to Joe'." In the context, that quote, from Stevie Smith, is priceless.
A&C also have a nice line in non-sequiturs. "What we now consider democracy was long and slow in evolving, and continues to evolve. Having only recently established its independence from Britain, the Republic of Ireland (sic) remained neutral during the Second World War." And this: "If, at times, the mass media may have lacked the courage to trust poetry, then there are also instances where poets as different as Tony Harrison and Sorley MacLean have had their work published in broadsheet newspapers, filmed, and broadcast through radio, tapes and more modern electronic media." Apart from causing one to wonder what media are more modern than film, radio and tapes, this suggests an idea for a Monty Python sketch in which the editor of the Sun takes his courage in both hands and suggests to Rupert Murdoch they should put their trust in poetry.
"As a rule of thumb, four or five poems were selected from each of the poets who seemed to us particularly important in the period, with the hope that these selections would provide a spine for the anthology." R.S. Thomas gets six; Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Norman McCaig, Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison, Michael Longley and Ian Hamilton Finlay (!) get five; Paul Muldoon's "Incantata", at twelve pages, gets more space than anything else. David Jones, Austin Clarke, George Barker, Richard Murphy and Thomas Kinsella get one poem apiece. Omitted altogether are John Montague, David Gascoyne and Michael Hartnett.
The choice is lousy, the introduction is a joke and the editors are idiots. What else is new at Penguin Books?
Brian Lynch's long poem about Northern Ireland, "An Angry Heart, An Empty House", has just been published in the Daily Telegraph/Arvon anthology, Ring of Words