Harvest of poetry

FOR someone like myself, who no longer has the time to read poetry the way it is meant to be read - reflectively, tranquility - anthologies are always welcome, especially a huge chukky volume like The Harvill Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry in English, edited by Michael Schmidt. Such collections give me the change to revisit favourite poems by poets I was first introduced to many years ago and now lie unread on my shelves, and also new poets whom I have not attempted to discover on my own.

In the hands of a skilled editor, such anthologies can be treasure troves, and there is no questioning the fact that Michael Schmidt is a skilled editor. The founder-editor in 1969 of that brilliant small press in the United Kingdom, Carcanet, Schmidt has been personally responsible for putting several important poets on the map, not least among them Sujata Bhatt who is the only poet of Indian origin to be included in the anthology. Which brings to me the first of my quibbles - the poets thought worthy of inclusion. This of course is a perennial quibble when it comes to anthologies. You can never have one that is representative enough, and if you have a strong editor, you can only hope that your tastes tally with his. I would have liked more Indian poets writing in English to have been represented, especially as the blurb claims that Indian voices find "adequate" (by implication) representation here. The edition states quite clearly that the poets represented here are those in their prime, who made the 20th Century theirs, and that there will be time enough for younger and newer voices to find a place in an anthology of 21st Century poetry. Fair enough, but still that is a quibble I have.

In his introduction, the editor sets out some of the other parameters he followed when putting together the book. One was an adaptation of Michael Robert's stated aim when putting together The Faber Book Of Modern Verse. Roberts declared: "I included only poems which seem to me to add to the resources of poetry, to be likely to influence the future development of poetry and language, and to please me for reasons neither personal nor idiosyncratic". To this Schmidt adds one difference of emphasis:"instead of his 'and please me' I must say 'and/or please me'." Taste is one function, judgment another; both have authority but they do not always operate in unison. It is possible (if taste is to develop) for it to be led by judgment; and there are poems in this book which puzzle me in a way that I believe will turn to pleasure in due course. There are other more specific parameters but space does not permit me to discuss them.

Let us turn to the poets instead. The anthology starts with Thomas Hardy and ends with Sophie Hannah, whom I have not read, but who is included to give the reader the taste of the voices of the future. The poem which closes the book, "The Norbert Deentressangle Van", was the only one written specifically for the book. In between Hardy and Hannah, you have some of the greatest voices of our time: Kipling, Housman, Yeats, Frost, Stevens, Williams, Lawrence, Pound, Moore, Eliot, Oliver, cummings, Graves, Crane, Hughes, Betjeman, Auden, Mac Neice, Roethke, Spender, Bishop, Berryman, Thomas Lowell, Larkin, Ginsberg, Ashbery, Walcot, Heaney, Plath, Motion, and dozens of other poems of the very fist rank, plus others whom I had not read and look forward to reading with pleasure such as Gwyneth Lewis, Bill Manhire, Derek Mahon, David Constantine and so and so forth.

It is a sumptuous anthology, and there are dozens of old familiars to get the taste buds tingling in anticipation (although I must say an unforgivable lapse was the omission of one of my all time favourites, Dylan Thomas ' "Poem in October").

It was hard to decide which poem to extract, and finally I decided to settle for some flag waving. Here is "Mulibrity" by Sujata Bhatt:

"I have thought so much about the girl

who gathered cow-dung in a wide,

round basket

along the main road passing by our house

and the Radhavallabh temple in

Maninagar.

I have thought so much about the way

she

moved her hands and her waist

and the smell of cow-dung and road- dust and wet canna lilies,

the smell of monkey breath and freshly

washed clothes

and the dust from crows' wings which

smells different -

and again the smell of cow-dung as the

girl scoops

it up, all these smells surrounding me

separately

and simultaneously - I have thought

so much

but have been unwilling to use her for

a metaphor,

for a nice image - but most of all

unwilling

to forget her or to explain to anyone

the greatness

and the power glistening through her

cheekbones

each time she found a particularly

promising

mound of dung".

DAVID DAVIDAR

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