Book 89 - Neil Astley "Staying Alive"

[jazzy_dave]

Neil Astley "Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times" (Bloodaxe Books)




This anthology of modern poetry is both a curious exercise in marketing (the close-up photo on the cover has nothing to do with any of the poems, but presumably makes the book more accessible for readers in their teens and twenties); and a very strong anthology of contemporary poems. There are famous authors and poems in this collection - Robert Frost, 'Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening'; Stevie Smith, 'Not Waving but Drowning'; Dylan Thomas, 'Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night' - but most of the poets are people I've either never heard of or never read, making this volume a great entry-point to their work. The editing is sensitive and inspired, placing poems next to each other in ways that create additional resonances. Sometimes the juxtaposition reveals the way one poem was inspired by or conceived explicitly as a response to another; in other cases, pairings let the reader compare two ways of experiencing or expressing the same emotion or situation. Yet, the editing is not heavy-handed; chapter introductions provide helpful information about many of the poems, but you can simply read just the poems and come away enlivened. Some poems in this collection that were new to me and that I really liked include: Robert Hayden, 'Those Winter Sundays'; Billy Collins, 'Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes'; Sharon Olds, 'True Love'; Fleur Adcock, 'For a Five Year Old'; Derek Mahon, 'Antarctica'; and Miroslav Holub, 'Brief Reflection on Accuracy'. A fine collection from a publisher known for quality poems.