Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

     There is an essay in Thomas Lynch’s recent book The Undertaking about the poet Matthew Sweeney’s hypochondria. In it Lynch tells the story of a worker in a scrap-metal yard on whom a car has fallen, fatally. Sweeney strongly identifies with the accident victim, all his suspicions about the arbitrariness of fate confirmed. We aren’t told if Sweeney has taken to wearing a hard hat, but together with Jo Shapcott he has compiled an anthology which often reads as if it feared the sky was about to fall on our heads. Emergency Kit is subtitled Poems for Strange Times, and in the introduction the editors make plain their belief that the modern reader inhabits a world where only the unexpected can be taken for granted. They have assembled poems which “present wild, childlike tales whose distorting visions break through to the truth; which make risky journeys into the unconscious and back; which revel in a rowdy irreverence or an odd eroticism; which are simultaneously hilarious and grim; or which appear to contain whole new worlds, parallel universes”. In the parallel universe of anthology-speak distorting visions and rowdy irreverence are hardly the most unusual copylines any more, but an anthology (and a Faber anthology at that) whose principal raison d’être is the strangeness of the times does raise interesting questions. Such as, first of all, whether the times are really as strange as Shapcott and Sweeney would have us believe. Second, whether, even if they are, this is a good enough premise for an anthology, any more than subtitling a collection of eighteenth-century writers ‘Poems for Predictable Times’ would be. And third,when all the talk of strangeness dies down, whether Emergency Kit presents a satisfying overview of contemporary poetry or leads us to rethink its sprinkling of twentieth-century classics in any significant way. On all three counts, I think, the answer is no.

     Like those other connoisseurs of the uncanny, Mulder and Scully, Shapcott and Sweeney pay their dues to the extra-terrestrial. Odia Ofeimun celebrates the “hike to Jehovah-hood” of the moon landing while Louis Simpson, in ‘Outward’, exults in how easy it is “to be anyone, anyone but oneself” in space. Only Auden is more sceptical, calling the moon landing a “grand gesture” before asking “But what does it period?” But by and large his insistence on looking beyond the surface, even if only the surface of the moon, is out of step with the non-committal aesthetic of Emergency Kit. As an anthology it is fascinated by the superficial, the offhand, the disengaged. Like Douglas Dunn’s cameraman, the poems of Emergency Kit find the world in crisis and ruefully admit “They suffer, and I catch only the surface”. Like Heaney and Hughes in The School Bag Shapcott and Sweeney have organised their anthology as an interweaving poème fleuve, pursuing a theme through maybe a half dozen poems before moving on. When it works the effect is polyphonic, but when it doesn’t it’s more like channel-surfing. One minute we get a run of elegiac meditations including Adrienne Rich’s ‘Diving into the Wreck’, Derek Mahon’s ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’ and Michael Longley’s ‘Ghetto’ (not exactly adventurous choices, but all good poems), the next we’re under the sheets with Marilyn Hacker, Sharon Olds and Heather McHugh (not so good poems this time). The juxtapositions may be carefully orchestrated, but in the indeterminate world of Emergency Kit, they might just as easily be an accident. What is lacking, here as elsewhere, is any sense of what difference it would make. The refusal of metanarrative may be correctly postmodern, but it’s no substitute for the sort of intelligent editing that goes into worthwhile anthologies like George Gömöri and George Szirtes’s The Colonnade of Teeth or Patrick Crotty’s Modern Irish Poetry, to give only two recent examples. 

     We are so used to poets wanting to be Auden these days it comes as no surprise to find him here, though the choice of such a near-senile poem as ‘Moon Landing’ takes some getting over. His inclusion, however, along with that of Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost offers some pointers as to who Shapcott and Sweeney see as the progenitors of our strange times. It is unusual, to say the least, that a flagship Faber anthology can omit T.S. Eliot, but how could room possibly be found, post-Julius, for the author of ‘Gerontion’? Heaney and Hughes let Charles Olson into The School Bag but Shapcott and Sweeney’s enthusiasm for the disconcerting does not extend to anything so experimental: a little W.S. Graham but no Pound (don’t even ask), no MacDiarmid, no Laura Riding, none of the Objectivists, a single user-friendly poem of Ashbery’s, and nothing too Cambridgey or Iain Sinclairish among the contemporary British contingent. R. S. Thomas and Geoffrey Hill are in, looking rather marooned, and Ted Hughes gets four poems, but Donald Davie, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Jennings, and Roy Fuller are nowhere in sight. It is good to have three poems of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s, but while Brendan Kennelly and Paul Durcan are in Thomas Kinsella and Medbh McGuckian are not, which would suggest that Emergency Kit’s journeys into the unconscious are not quite as risky as the editors would like to believe. Emergency Kit also contains a generous helping of what we used to call ‘commonwealth writing’, with work by such fine poets as Gwen Harwood, Allen Curnow and Judith Wright (though not A.D. Hope or Dorothy Hewett), but here too the strangeness goes only so far. Les Murray, hammer of metropolitan smugness, gets four poems; significantly they are all ‘cuddly’ Murray rather than some of the work in which he unleashes his viciously anti-liberal bile. Perhaps Sweeney and Shapcott don’t think they’re his best work, in which case I would agree, but the uneasiness with poetry as a vehicle not for playful scepticism but fully-convinced religious dogma is typical. You may be able to treat a George Herbert poem in The School Bag as a harmless museum piece but not so a Murray poem in which a feminist has her face scalded and disfigured for her sins.

     While Shapcott and Sweeney have assembled many excellent poems, from Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Crusoe in England’ to Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Adultery’, it is in its less satisfying work that Emergency Kit comes closest to capturing the spirit of the age. For when the poems of Emergency Kit are bad, as they often are, they are bad in a peculiarly representative way. Ask yourself if we really need any more: humourless bad sex poems, with or without post-coital cigarettes (Neil Rollinson, Sharon Olds, Heather McHugh); pious domestic epiphanies (Tess Gallagher); would-be comic antiquarianism (Peter Reading); sub-Flann O’Brien Celtic magic realism (Ian Duhig); poems in which children “smell unopened” (Mark Doty); plonky wee DIY Northern Irish vernacular (Tom Paulin); poems that “consider underwear in the abstract” (Lawrence Ferlinghetti); imagine-something-terrible-has-just-destroyed-my-domestic-idyll (but-of-course-it-hasn’t) (Maurice Riordan); sequel poems (James Tate for ‘I Am a Finn’ and ‘I Am Still a Finn’). Some of these writers at least are better than the poems for which they are featured, and Emergency Kit does give a flavour of what is worth reading in contemporary poetry, with strong work by Carol Ann Duffy, Don Paterson, Lavinia Greenlaw and Kathleen Jamie. But the list of absentees is damningly long: where are Jorie Graham, Denise Riley, David Constantine, Jamie McKendrick, Stephen Knight, Douglas Oliver, Stephen Romer, Harry Clifton, John Kinsella and Gwyneth Lewis, to limit myself to ten names? Emergency Kit was evidently too overcome by fin-de-millénaire excitement to notice them. Strange or not, these are exciting times in which to be a reader or writer of poetry, but to the editors of this lacklustre anthology I say: count me out of your soggy Zeitgeist.