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Simon Armitage and Robert Crawford (eds.): The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945. London: Penguin, £10.99.

Sean O’Brien (ed.): The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland after 1945. London: Picador, £9.99.

     Anthologists have a thankless task. Thus they may as well nail three theses to the canonical door: (1) you can’t please everybody, so don’t try; (2) only aesthetic principles are defensible; (3) there is no excuse for boring bits: by definition, anthologies should be full of wonders – “blinkbonny! airgold! thundergay!” as Edwin Morgan (see below) might put it.

     Before bemoaning the ways in which Simon Armitage and Robert Crawford together, and Sean O’Brien all by himself, have breached these simple precepts, I must thank them for pleasures and discoveries. Both anthologies, for instance, select well from the over-prolific Morgan, whose wit appears to advantage in its linguistic mode (‘The First Men on Mercury’, ‘Canedolia’) and in its metaphysical mode – a poem about a jigsaw-champion completing, against the clock, a featureless puzzle based on “the Mid-Atlantic photographed from a plane”. ‘Canedolia’, subtitled “an off-concrete Scottish fantasia”, reads like an off-manifesto for the other varieties of Scots/ Glaswegian/ jabberwocky/ separatist-speak that now abound:

what is it like there?
och it’s freuchie, it’s faifley, it’s wamphray, it’s frandy, it’s sliddery.

     Scottish poetry comes over as pretty freuchie and frandy in both anthologies. It benefits from the cultural biases of O’Brien (in whom one senses the North tugging tetchily against the metropolis), even if Robert Crawford has kept the Penguin finger more faifley on the Canedolian pulse. Hence four essential pieces by Ian Hamilton Finlay; Robert Garioch’s disturbing ‘The Wire’, which shows that Edwin Muir has no monopoly of paranoid parable; and Norman MacCaig’s ‘Aunt Julia’, a beautiful elegy for an island way of life: “She was brown eggs, black skirts/ and a keeper of threepenny bits/ in a teapot”. 350 pages later, Jackie Kay’s ‘Brendon Gallacher’, about an imaginary childhood friend, proves again that nostalgia, people and technique keep poetry in business. Every line of five five-line stanzas is unobtrusively rhymed on an r-sound:

“...There never have been any Gallachers next door.”
And he died then, my Brendon Gallacher,
Flat out on my bedroom floor, his spiky hair,
His impish grin, his funny flapping ear.
Oh Brendon. Oh my Brendon Gallacher.

It’s hard to choose boringly from Tom Leonard, although neither anthology identifies the best qualities of Iain (O’Brien mislays his second “i”) Crichton Smith or Douglas Dunn. I remain unconvinced about W.S. Graham, who appears marked out for “revival”; but agree with both editors in tipping Kathleen Jamie and Don Paterson for the future. And these two Scottish poets complement one another: Paterson’s admirable formal ambition occasionally becomes over-elaborate; Jamie’s demotic sensitivity and eye for the eloquent image (“postcards sent from small Scots towns/ in 1960”) occasionally needs a touch of fine-tuning.

     And how does Ireland stand? The usual suspects are here with more or less the usual poems. There is consensus on Carson’s ‘Dresden’, Heaney’s ‘Punishment’, Mahon’s ‘A Disused Shed’, Longley’s ‘Wounds’. (Has there been a war in Ireland or something?) Armitage/ Crawford, however, boldly go for a wondrous long poem in the case of Muldoon (‘Incantata’). But beyond poets known in England, or known for being Irish in England (Tom Paulin, Bernard O’Donoghue), there is nothing to match the informed representation of Scotland. Patrick Kavanagh, for instance, is scandalously treated, and the choices from his work in both anthologies violate the “since/ after 1945” rubric. I will argue later against the aptness of that date, but once chosen it should have been respected. You may as well not bother with Irish-language poetry if Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill is always going to be the token translation-friendly inclusion (Scots Gaelic and Welsh come off badly, too). Moreover, Ireland has dozens of poets just as mediocre as the English poets so abundantly included.

     But I breach my own precepts if I ask anthologists to please me rather than have more courage to please themselves. And, apart from the fact that wails from Wales may be more to the point (or so a letter in Poetry Review claims), national headcounts distort the “British Isles” axis which is crucial to both anthologies if too slackly realised. Yet national, feminist, ethnic, generational and class considerations may all have distracted the editors into their worst failing – fragmentation. The Penguin Book includes 141 poets, 55 of them represented by a single poem. In The Firebox the proportions are 126/ 62. This is ridiculous. You can imagine the exchanges. Armitage to Crawford, O’Brien to himself: “We’ve got to put Buggins in.” “But I don’t like any of Buggins’s poems.” “There must be one that’s OK – you know, that jokey one he always does at readings or the postmoderny one.” “Are four lines by Adrian Mitchell worse than none?” “You could say that it flags up the fall of empire/ rise of women/ Europe.” “But do we really need another poem about Hull?” “At least his stuff illustrates both the durability and the dilemmas of the English poet in the age of Muldoon.” “As long as you make that absolutely clear in the note.” “Can we leave her out after the Poetry Review hype?” In fact, I see evidence of stern decisions here and there. But if every lone poem (I did not count long poems) were omitted, or only wondrous ones kept according to poem- rather than poet-determined priorities, a start would have been made on properly opinionated canons.

     One poem per poet usually dominates the end of anthologies as they hedge their bets with posterity. Yet much depends, too, on where and how you begin. Armitage/ Crawford do best here: Edwin Muir, Robert Graves, Hugh MacDiarmid; a little later, MacNeice, Auden, Dylan Thomas. O’Brien evokes a mysterious literary criterion called “becoming established” in order to explain his exclusion of poems by the aforenamed from the historical context to which they belong and which they help to define:

this anthology [concentrates] on poetry which thinks of itself as resident in the postwar world even when it harks back beyond the great divide of 1939-1945. To have included work by poets who became established in the years before 1945 would have meant producing a very different kind of book.

Leaving aside the problematic issue of whether 1939-45 marks a “great divide” for every Irish poet, and the fact that O’Brien does nothing to date the poems he takes from various stages of poets’ careers (nor do Armitage/ Crawford), MacNeice’s postwar poetry, for instance, is highly conscious of its historical situation. If 1945 is indeed a watershed for both anthologies, this chiefly appears in the work of those who straddle the “divide” – as in Charles Causley’s moving ‘Armistice Day’, well spotted by O’Brien. All by itself, 1945 is a curiously empty date: one hand clapping. Inconsistently, O’Brien includes two poems by Keith Douglas (absent from Armitage/ Crawford). In fact, 1939 would have been a better starting-point for various reasons – not least, Auden’s ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’. It would have given “war poems” by Douglas and others their historical meaning and influence, and given O’Brien no excuse for omitting Graves, Auden, MacNeice, Thomas et al. This would also have set standards for his whole volume, making it even more embarrassing to print weak poems. And further challenges have been ducked on all sides. As Randall Jarrell puts it in Poetry and the Age: “You may leave out James Whitcomb Riley because you are afraid of being laughed at, but if you leave out Spenser you mean business.” Armitage/ Crawford should at least have lived up to their brilliant start and not tailed off into the contemporary second-rate. They “mean business” when they set later Auden (‘In Praise of Limestone’, ‘The Fall of Rome’, ‘The Shield of Achilles’) side by side with later MacNeice (‘All Over Again’, ‘The Taxis’, ‘The Suicide’, ‘Soap Suds’): a chance to relish and compare varieties of postwar parable.

     As with devolution, the English question haunts both anthologies, although only O’Brien raises it explicitly. He refers, for instance, to a Celtic “cultural assurance which their English neighbours may in fact envy”. Does he seek a kind of viagra for English verse? (Perhaps Benjamin Zephaniah’s ‘Verbal Riddim’ would do the trick.) Certainly his image of poetry has macho features: “For an art form often consigned to a quiet corner by those who never read it, poetry displays a vigour verging on ferocity”. He likes the word “confidence”: “Hughes has energy and confidence”, “the current confidence of Scots poetry”, “the confidence of women poets”. The fallacy here is that poetry depends on “confidence” in a merely cultural or commonplace sense, the sense in which Tony Blair is confident. It’s also time that tougher questions were asked about the monotony of Hughes’s and Tony Harrison’s rhythms, since both now slackly stand for a kind of Yorkshire/ working-class alleged “vigour”. Poetry undeniably has complex affiliations with what has been culturally repressed or unexpressed. But once “the emergence of new poetries from formerly unsuspected sources” (so what else is new?) has occurred, it’s back to the artistic drawing-board, back to deeper impulses, back to Yeats’s “mind moving upon silence”. Northern Irish poetry, as O’Brien is fully aware, turned out to be about art as much as life. “Confidence” has recently rushed far too many slim and fat vols into print. And it’s really a lack of confidence that speaks: uncertainty about value and intensity and whether they are allowed any more. If very little genuine poetry has “emerged” in England during the last fifteen years, just let ‘Genesis’, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ and ‘A Staffordshire Murderer’ sit there reproachfully and encouragingly.

     O’Brien is perhaps more uneasy about artistic value than his resignation to overworked terms like “postmodernism” suggests. He frames each poet with brief headnotes (more up to date than those in the Penguin) which include critical comment, some of it lively, some of it hard-pushed: “Williams cannot be categorised but might be called a poetic cousin of Peter Didsbury”; “[Bernard O’Donoghue] is unusual in combining his role as a medievalist with criticism of contemporary poetry... O’Donoghue further confounds the stereotype of the scholar-poet by writing a limped anecdotal verse.” Eat your heart out, Philip Sidney. The quoted sentences seem very far away from poetry. They make poetry seem very far away. What may be lacking is not so much confidence (in what the author or culture can produce), as belief: belief in poetry and the high ambition that induces. Such belief, for reasons unconnected with Braveheart or Riverdance, is probably now more prevalent outside England. Northern Ireland offers few grounds for confidence; it may offer grounds for belief. And, if we look back, Dylan Thomas galvanised postwar poetry in still-untold ways. O’Brien celebrates the Promethean “fire of creation”, yet he includes many poems that neither burn nor (“ferociously”) bite. Consider, too, Philip Larkin’s letters and the sense of vocation they disclose. The greatest fallacy is to confuse being a poet with being a writer.

     If O’Brien is into confidence, Armitage/ Crawford are into other dubious extra-literary substances, namely “democracy” and “pluralism”. While protesting quality, their introduction, headed ‘The Democratic Voice’, asserts: “Largely rejecting pontifical tones, poets in Britain and Ireland wrote as part of a shift towards post-imperial, pluralist societies and communities.” Pluralism as a democratic or devolutionary principle is not identical with the drunkenness of being poetically serious. Where poetry and devolution meet may be less in constitutional change than in the “knowable community”. Thus devolution could help to restore holistic aspirations to English poetry (Peter Reading’s work is English poetry, rather exhibitionistically, giving up). The Penguin introduction, less a fashion victim than O’Brien’s, has sensible things to say about language, form and “unpredictability of poetic life”. But it, too, sells the pass by pluralising the word poetry itself. This implicitly condescends to “devolved” or multi-cultural poetry as a diluted poetry (Yeats?). Alternatively, it relieves the pressure of value and arguments about value. Everyone shall have prizes. Regional publishing, we are told, “has disseminated a proliferation of poetries”. The ugly phrasing, as if poetry were an outbreak of measles or pustules, confirms this abject relativism as a pluralism too far. There is no safety for poetry in numbers. And the language of poetry criticism must stop making concessions both to “identity-discourse” (as Peter McDonald has cogently argued) and to cultural studies. What Shelley would write A Defence of Poetries? What Shelley does the very notion silence?