This epoch-marking anthology presents a map of poetry from Britain and Ireland which readers can follow. You will not get lost here as in other anthologies - with their vast lists of poets summoned up to serve a critic's argument or to illustrate a journalistic overview. Instead, Edna Longley shows you the key poets of the century, and through interlinking commentary points up the connections between them as well as their relationship with the continuing poetic traditions of these islands. Edna Longley draws the poetic line of the century not through culture-defining groups but through the work of the most significant poets of our time. Because her guiding principle is aesthetic precision, the poems themselves answer to their circumstances. Readers will find this book exciting and risk-taking not because her selections are surprising but because of the intensity and critical rigour of her focus, and because the poems themselves are so good. This is a vital anthology because the selection is so pared down. Edna Longley has omitted showy, noisy, ephemeral writers who drown out their contemporaries but leave later or wiser readers unimpressed. Similarly there is no place here for the poet as entertainer, cultural spokesman, feminist mythmaker or political commentator. While anthologies survive, the idea of poetic tradition survives. An anthology as rich as Edna Longley's houses intricate conversations between poets and between poems, between the living and the dead, between the present and the future. It is a book which will enrich the reader's experience and understanding of modern poetry. The anthology covers the work of 70 poets: Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, Edward Thomas, D.H. Lawrence, Siegfried Sassoon, Edwin Muir, T.S. Eliot, Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg, Hugh MacDiarmid, Wilfred Owen, Charles Hamilton Sorley, Robert Graves, Austin Clarke, Basil Bunting, Stevie Smith, Patrick Kavanagh, Norman Cameron, William Empson, W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, John Hewitt, Robert Garioch, Norman MacCaig, R.S. Thomas, Henry Reed, Dylan Thomas, Alun Lewis, W.S. Graham, Keith Douglas, Edwin Morgan, Philip Larkin, Ian Hamilton Finlay, John Montague, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, Sylvia Plath, Fleur Adcock, Tony Harrison, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Douglas Dunn, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Paul Durcan, Tom Leonard, Carol Rumens, Selima Hill, Ciaran Carson, James Fenton, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon, Jo Shapcott, Ian Duhig, Carol Ann Duffy, Kathleen Jamie, Simon Armitage and Don Paterson.
Industry Reviews
Those not repelled by the pomposity of the back-cover copy ("there is no place here for the poet as entertainer," etc.) might actually find themselves, well, entertained by this assemblage of 20th-century works by poets from the British Isles, with the occasional American or New Zealander thrown in for good measure. Longley stresses in her brisk preface the dominance of the lyric mode, in which "the common factor is concentration," and she argues that the differences between "urban" and "rural" poetries are not as glaring as one might at first assume. Crucial to the poems of the century were the effects of industrialization, especially as manifested in urbanization and, to an even greater degree, war. Thomas Hardy dryly observes that "After two thousand years of mass / We've got as far as poison-gas." The number of pages allotted to each of the 59 contributors peaks at 13 (for Auden), and brief critical/biographical notes preface all the entries, which are organized chronologically. We are reminded, for instance, that Stevie Smith was so nicknamed "because her fringe resembled that of the jockey Steve Donaghue." T.S. Eliot, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, Dylan Thomas, and W.B. Yeats are all here, and their positions are secure; of course, it is more difficult to predict the staying power of poets still writing today, although Seamus Heaney and Thom Gunn are likely candidates. Whether anthologists of 21st-century verse will include Medbh McGuckian or Tom Leonard (the latter, employing Glaswegian dialect, morphs W.C. Williams's "This Is Just to Say" into "Jist ti Let Yi No") is anyone's guess. Enlightening and entertaining, though not essential. (Kirkus Reviews)
