It's almost obligatory to preface an article about poetry by saying that not many people read it these days. Specifically, not many people read modern poetry—the dead out-sell the living in the English language many times over, with its best-loved and most-read poems belonging to a few dozen authors born between around 1500 and 1950. Of all the theories advanced to explain this, the most obvious has always seemed to me the most likely: that poetic talent in contemporary culture is largely channelled into forms and media other than traditional poetry—spoken word, popular music, the increasingly catch-all forms of the novel, film, radio, and even advertising. Certainly, the dreary pretensions of many contemporary poets suggest that they have little interest either in or for most readers.
I'm a poetry optimist, however, largely because I have always found that when I do find "the best words in the best order" they satisfy a need in me that nothing else quite does—a hankering for more permanent, resonant and awakening ways of talking about the world. It's a need I think most people have, in some form, which is perhaps why I've been so enjoying Penguin's latest poetry anthology, Poems for Life. It's not a book that preaches either a "crisis" in verse or the "agenda" modern poetry ought to follow. It is, rather, an anthology in the classic sense: one that believes in the importance of its subject, and that is content to rely on judicious selection and arrangement for its justification. The Preface, by Laura Barber (the judicious editor in question), puts it rather beautifully:
When we are young, we are quite used to the startling and stirring effect of poetry. It has a natural and instinctive place in our life: as we learn nursery rhymes and join in with playground chants, our enjoyment of poetry is almost physical—we taste the shape of the words in our mouth, we feel the rhythms and we hear the rhymes. Discovering the right poem at the right time when you are older can be equally powerful and visceral… and, as well as giving expression to our innermost feelings, poems can occasionally push us up against the flames and change us for ever.This sums up exactly what I felt when I first encountered a number of the poems in the anthology—not least Sylvia Plath's "Morning Song," Philip Larkin's "The Old Fools" and Dylan Thomas's "And Death Shall Have No Dominion"—which have since become permanent parts of my world. It's a lovely book, handsomely bound; and it is also, I think, a salutary reminder that audiences have the right to ask a lot of their poetry: not that it should be easy, but that it should be eloquent and honest and transforming.
