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Women’s Work, eds. Eva Salzman, Amy Wack, 2008, Seren. £12.50 ISBN 978-1-8541143-1-0 an anthology of modern women poets writing in English, 300pp , 250 contributors, US/UK/Ireland.

Editing an anthology is fraught with risk – the critics will complain about the wrong poets, the wrong poems, the wrong concept for bringing the selected poems together; the poets included will eye each other’s counts, those not included will marvel at their omission, and both will, ever after, retain their suspicions of favouritism, the editor’s lack of discernment, yatteda-yatteda.

Putting together an anthology of this calibre and magnitude must have been thoroughly daunting and I want to start by congratulating these two editors, fine poets in their own right, not only for taking it on but for doing such an incredibly good job with it, presenting us with a wide-ranging selection of very accomplished and authoritative poets and poems.

The poems are gathered into 14 themes, beginning with How Love Works: love, lust – hopefully at the same time – marriage, through The Art of Work and ending with How the World Works. They are drawn from some – but not too many – old favourites (Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s How Do I Love Thee?; several of Emily Dickinson’s poems), through those of popular modern poets (Fleur Adcock, Wendy Cope, Rita Dove, Carol Ann Duffy, UA Fanthorpe, Adrienne Rich) to those less-well-known poets very deserving of the recognition brought by a high-calibre anthology such as this (Leah Fritz, Valeria Melchioretto, Jane Routh, Kathryn Simmonds). Each poet has a short biography in the book too, so you can look up those who are new to you.

What a joy to be presented with a selection that is so far from ‘the same old stuff’ that it excites before you even read it! There are, of course, some poets who I am sorry not to see included... but there always are and there’s no solution to that one.

In a long polemic introduction (part I, 11 pages), loaded with facts and figures and quoting from various authorities, Salzman gives justification for a women-only anthology, which boils down to, roughly:

• the work of women poets is not deemed worthy enough
  of serious critical review – ‘Writing about partner or family,
  she is a domestic poet; meanwhile, he is absorbed in the
  timeless themes of love and passion’. [Quite]

• women poets who eschew the idea that positive
  discrimination is needed, on the basis that they, after
  all,have made it into the canon without it, are
  kidding themselves; they are playing within the rules of a
  patriarchal game which carries the risk of limiting their poetic
  development. [very interesting quotation from Adrienne
  Rich on pages 15/16 to support this]

• women who seek to crumble the patriarchal barriers
  are either attacked or dismissed – or subjected to any other
  mechanism that makes it impossible for them to be listened
  to. [Salzman cites evidence from the 2008 presidential
  nomination race that people ‘overlook race more readily
  than gender’]

There is also a part II to Salzman’s introduction – a potted history; very useful, thorough and informative (14 pp) – just don’t read it on the same day you want to enjoy actual poems.

The editors have ordered the poems in such a way that ‘they elucidate each other through the company they keep’. I felt a distinct need to resist this reading instruction in favour of isolating each poem for engagement on its own terms. This is a big book, not to be swallowed whole; dipping in and out over a period of time was my preferred method of attack and I have found it very rewarding. Every poem I’ve read clearly deserves its place, whether striking home immediately:

   Lorna Crozier, What Comes After, “I am my own big dog. //
   Every night at my feet / I am a big sack of sleep / stinking of me.”

   Muriel Rukeyser, prose poem Myth (‘she’ is the Sphinx):

      ... “When you say Man” said Oedipus “you include women too.
       Everyone knows that.” She said, “That’s what you think.”

or asking questions I want to take a long time to mull over:

Jane Hirshfield, The Bell Zygmunt, “The sound close in, my friend told me later, is almost silent. // At ten kilometres, even those who have never heard it know what it is. // If you stand near during thunder, she said, // you will hear a reply.”

Anne-Marie Fyfe, Novgorod Sidings, “... The rest is non- / linear and poorly focused. The engine // slows at the first tunnel, erases carriage / after relentless carriage from the frame.”

There are a lot of poems I would have liked to quote in full: Lorine Niedecker’s What Horror to Awake At Night; Pattian Rogers’s When You Watch Us Sleeping; Kate Bingham’s Things I Learned at University... and so many more I would have liked to refer to. This is a very good book.

The overriding impression I have of it – overriding concepts of theme, meaning, form, language, engagement; beyond my own likes and preferences – is that (yes, I am saying it again) these poets and poems are accomplished and authoritative. They have earned a place in posterity’s poetry pool. They are worthy of serious critical review. I am very glad I have this anthology in my collection.