Being Alive Edited by Neil Astley Bloodaxe, 512pp. £10.95
This book is best understood as two things: a copious gathering of accessible poems and an argument about the state of contemporary poetry. As the former, it mostly succeeds; as the latter, it mostly fails. Like its predecessor, the anthology Staying Alive, it is a book of conflicting aims and mixed results. On the one hand it contains many unarguably great poems, from W.H. Auden's 'Musée des Beaux Arts' to Elizabeth Bishop's 'At the Fishhouses'. On the other hand it contains some acrid polemic, such as the following excerpt from the appendix: ". . . avoid any book of literary criticism issued by a university press, and any book which refers to poems as texts or which uses the expression decode or foregrounding."
While the use of the word "any" in this sentence is intemperate enough, I think most readers will be surprised to learn that "foregrounding" is a word to avoid. Neil Astley, the editor of this book, has been on the receiving end from academic critics in the past (hence the hostility to university presses) and Being Alive is a noticeably defensive book. Most readers will be surprised at how much of the book is taken up with the self-protective reproduction of endorsements Astley has received from various celebrities and civilians. This would not be so troubling if Astley, as the founder of Bloodaxe Books, was not also his own publisher, and hence in the position of publishing his own good press. For example, when we are told that the editor was given "a D. Litt by Newcastle University for his pioneering work", we must assume that the editor wrote these words about himself.
Apart from accessibility, the poems in Being Alive are bound together by a loosely vitalistic ethos, captured in the following lines by (the New Zealand poet) Fiona Farrell, from which the book's title seems to derive:
I believe in
life. You have to,
don't you, being alive?
The difficulty with sentiments such as these is that, like believing in motherhood and apple pie, they are so general as not to be useful. Bloodaxe is an energetic publishing house, but energy sometimes means sloppiness and the overall plan of Being Alive - the poems are divided into categories such as 'Being and Loss', 'Daily Round' and 'Mad World' - looks hastily arranged.
On the positive side, Astley's taste in poetry is hearteningly wide. As a publishing house, Bloodaxe makes available in English such internationally important poets as Miroslav Holub and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Being Alive is similarly cosmopolitan. Irish poets are represented in force. While the old guard of Heaney, Longley and Muldoon find themselves anthologised once again, the book performs a valuable service for those younger Irish writers who might not get the distribution or publicity they deserve in Britain and the US. Of the younger generation, Tom French, Vona Groarke and Sinead Morrissey are well-represented. Tom French's poem about cultural and economic poverty in rural Ireland, 'Pity the Bastards', is already something of a contemporary classic:
Pity the bastards who cut crops from the centre
out to give the corncrakes time to make a break,
who dandled concertinas on their knees like babies
and loved the only note the wind could play
on the top of a gate because it had no fingers
Not all the poems in the book are this good, and many of the very best poets in English (John Ashbery, Jorie Graham and Anne Carson) are not here at all. But when the rickety intellectual scaffolding is taken away, more than enough remains simply in the form of several hundred fine poems. Being Alive is especially suitable for anyone who would like to own a book of poems for the first time.
John Redmond is a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Liverpool. Carcanet published his book of poems, Thumb's Width, in 2001 and a creative writing textbook is due from Blackwell's this year
Poetry
John Redmond