Not so much a review as a thought prompted by the introduction of 'Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets'

Roddy Lumsden, ed., Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2010)

As soon as you make a decision that one thing as better and another worse, by however fine a gradation, and however footling the ideas or objects that are being evaluated, you acknowledge the existence of a hierarchy. You  suggest the existence, somewhere, of a ladder with the greatest at the top and the least at the bottom. And everyone does it about everything all the time. Wine-bibbers, sales-shoppers, flirts, holiday-makers, diners, minglers. And, of course, readers of poetry evaluate, compare, find some to exceed the mark and others to fall short no less than people who partake in any other kind of activity.

Why I find introductions to anthologies so fascinating is that they have to, in some way, justify the reason why (to paraphrase Coleridge) they are as they are and not otherwise. This inevitably involves a declaration, or at least a hint at, evaluative criteria. Scarce resources (bound pages and the labour and materials that go into producing, marketing and distributing them) must be allocated according to something as the quantity of raw material (poems) so vastly exceed what these resources are capable of supporting,

So where does the anthologist begin? I try to imagine a simpler, probably mythical, age when certain universally-agreed ideas could justify inclusion. ‘These poems’, the anthologist would write, ‘contain fine feelings, graceful images, moral sentiments and lofty ideals’. Everyone would agree that these were good things, and exactly the sort of thing poetry should contain. But just try pleading on their behalf now. What are you trying to pull?

Roddy Lumsden, editor of Identity Parade states that the poetry he has chosen for inclusion reflects the fact that poetry is ‘less dominated by men and more representative of this country’s ethnic mix’. He finishes rousingly: ‘it is the pluralism of contemporary British and Irish poetry which stands out in the pages of this book. Plural in its register – monologue, memoir, satire, comedy, complaint; plural in its regional and ethnic diversity; plural in its subject-matter and – moving from traditional metrics to fractured syntax, from dialect to diatribe, mirror poem to prose poem – satisfyingly plural in its form and style’. It seems that what justifies a poem’s inclusion is that it – or its author – is in some way different to other poems or poets that are included. This makes me uneasy because (this seems so simple I hesitate to write it) it does not acknowledge that it’s inevitable to like some poems more than others.

I write this (I even think this) with immense trepidation, self-doubt, and the expectation at every turn of a proof that I am Very Wrong. Two recent occurrences buttress me. One is hearing a student in a class I taught reading a line of Geoffrey Hill (‘September fattens on the vine’) and saying ‘That’s what poetry is for me, the sound of those words’. A large proportion of the others instinctively nodded their assent: it was what poetry was for them too. The second was an occasion recently at a friend’s house. My friend’s brother didn’t read poetry often, but he had studied Yeats at school. Did I know the poem about the house burnings? He meant ‘In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz’, one of my favourites. ‘The light of evening, Lissadell / Great windows open to the south’, I said. He asked if I would recite the whole thing. Reader, I did:

The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
But a raving autumn shears
Blossom from the summer's wreath;
The older is condemned to death,
Pardoned, drags out lonely years
Conspiring among the ignorant.
I know not what the younger dreams —
Some vague Utopia — and she seems,
When withered old and skeleton-gaunt,
An image of such politics.
Many a time I think to seek
One or the other out and speak
Of that old Georgian mansion,
mix pictures of the mind, recall
That table and the talk of youth,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.

Dear shadows, now you know it all,
All the folly of a fight
With a common wrong or right.
The innocent and the beautiful.
Have no enemy but time;
Arise and bid me strike a match
And strike another till time catch;
Should the conflagration climb,
Run till all the sages know.
We the great gazebo built,
They convicted us of guilt;
Bid me strike a match and blow.

He wanted to hear it again because he, like me, had at one point been entranced by it. Because for him, as for me, it is one of those works that (in the phrase of Seamus Heaney) connects the ear and the nervous system.

So do I think it’s wrong for the diversity of the backgrounds of the authors to be a criterion for inclusion? Actually, no. I think it is important to publish the work of people of all backgrounds so that all people can find something that answers their own experience in literature. A thought experiment: I pick up an anthology that has, like Identity Parade, eighty-five poets. Like Identity Parade, it has photos of the all of the poets smiling or brooding above their work. (An interjection: why photographs? Would an anthology showcasing new British short story writers have their photo over their work? Maybe it would. I’m not sure that makes it any better, though). Anyway, on with the experiment: I flick through and see that every last one of the eighty-five is white and male. Yes, reassuringly, I find that I would be horrified.  'The chauvinist', I would sneer at its editor, and I would think myself his more tolerant, more open-minded better. I am not critical of the identity of the author being a consideration; I am unsettled by the emphasis that is put on it. We should not be shy about saying that the sounds of poems exist and matter independently of almost all other criteria and that these, more than anything else, determine how and how long poems will live.