edited by Don Paterson and Charles Simic(St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 2004)
Trade Paperback, 191 Pages, Poetry Anthology
ABCD Rating: BACKLIST
From the Cover: New British Poetry presents the exciting work of thirty-six poets from England, Scotland, and Wales. In compiling this groundbreaking anthology, T.S. Eliot Prize-winning poet Dan Paterson and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic followed two rules: the poets should be chosen should be born after 1945 and should have at least two books published in Britain. The resulting anthology collects some of the very best work of a new generation of poets who have come of age since Larkin and Hughes. From established poets such as Andrew Motion and James Fenton to mid-career poets such as Glyn Maxwell and Kathleen Jamie to the most recent T.S. Eliot Prize-winner Alice Oswald, the work is fiercely intelligent, often irreverent, and engaged with traditional forms and an exhilarating range of styles. A generous sampling of each poet’s work is included. As Don Paterson writes in his Introduction, “this group of poets represents some of the most intelligent and imaginative writers working in the English language today.” New British Poetry is destined to become a landmark anthology, introducing many important new voices to North American readers.
My Review: In the first place, this collection put me completely out of my comfort zone and depth of knowledge that I when I saw it on the required reading list for my British Contemporary Lit class, I was—to say the least—wary. Poetry is not and has even been my strong point. I just have never been able to get into poetry like I am able to get into prose writing. The novel and its secrets are something I can unlock … poetry often remains opaque. Secondly, it is British poetry. Most, if not all, of my undergraduate work and research has been in American letters and I “get” what American authors are concerned with, what they’re writing about and what they have to say. The Brit’s sensibility in writing is something that often escapes me. So, to have to read, analyze and discuss British poetry filled me with a sense of dread.
However, diving into the poets and poems that Paterson and Simic chose for this anthology, I found myself more engaged in what was being said and how it was being expressed than I ever thought I could be. Much of this poetry is very good and some of it is absolutely amazing. There are some stinkers, but not only is that purely a matter of taste but it’s also to be expected in an anthology such as this. Not every poem can be a home run, no matter how carefully the editors make their choices.
Among my absolute favorites are “Shibboleth” by Michael Donaghy, “Little Red-Cap” by Carol Ann Duffy and the best poem in the book (in my estimation) “Fundamentals” by Ian Duhig. There are others, of course, “Sound Bite” by Fred d’Aguiar is brilliant in its deconstruction of the media and military; “That Old-Time Religion” by Peter Didsbury is irreverent and hilarious and owes so much to Milton’s Paradise Lost; “The Bacchæ” by Donaghy is a great Country Mouse-City Mouse-esque take on the London party/club/rave scene; Duhig’s “Chocolate Soldier” shows the dark underbelly of Victorian Imperialism and his “The Lammas Hireling” is such a fun and eerie poem that it’s hard not to just post them here and let you read them for yourselves; and yet, it is “Shibboleth,” “Little Red-Cap” and “Fundamentals” that so captured my attention that I want to focus on those ones for a moment.
“Shibboleth”: The poem’s title, is a word that refers to features of language and particularly to a word whose pronunciation identifies its speaker as being a member or not a member of a particular group. This fits with the poem’s theme of discovering infiltrators through the knowledge of trivia, and also fits with the common idea—whether it is correct or not—that Allies, especially American Allied troops, during WWII used the knowledge of American pop culture trivia to discover German spies within their ranks.
As the poem states, and as Hollywood perpetuated, a knowledge of (or lack thereof) such trivial things as “Cheetah,” Betty Grable’s gams, Bogie’s films, or Babe Ruth’s home run record, or who the New York Yankee’s played in the World Series, could be deadly. That’s the sense of urgency that this poem seems to be trying to convey. This is especially explicit in the final stanza of the poem as the narrating soldier shaves, intoning, almost liturgically, the “Christian names of the Andrews Sisters,” in the hopes that one day, such information will save him as he approaches the pickets and is confronted by a sentry late at night and is asked.
His being able to recite such a trivial piece of information could clearly mean he is not a German spy, though I am intrigued by the completely different sense that this poem takes on when one imagines the speaker as a German soldier preparing to infiltrate (or already having successfully infiltrated) the American and Allied lines, and now trying to keep up the charade by trying to remember the “Christian names of the Andrews Sisters” as the unfamiliar Anglican names are formed on his Teutonic lips as he shaves, waiting for the time when such knowledge fails him and he is found out. This particular interpretation gives the poem a whole different kind of urgency that I find very intriguing.
“Little Red-Cap”: There is a long history of authors and poets re-telling the story of “Little Red Riding Hood” (done most famously by Angela Carter in her short stories “The Werewolf,” “The Company of Wolves” and “Wolf-Alice” (all found in the anthology The Bloody Chamber) and Carol Ann Duffy is doing exactly that: adding her own vision and ideas of what “Little Red Riding Hood” means, though Duffy’s poem seems to be strongly influenced by Carter’s story; compare the final line in Carter’s “The Company of Wolves”—“See! sweet and sound she sleeps in granny’s bed, between the paws of the tender wolf”—with this line from Duffy’s poem, “I clung till dawn to his thrashing fur, for / what little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf? / Then I slid from between his heavy matted paws […]”
To me, this seems to be a very strong influence, though to be fair to Duffy, the story of “Little Red Riding Hood” has always been very highly sexually charged. It has been variously interpreted to be a classic warning against becoming a “working girl” or prostitute, with the red cloak being a stereotypical symbol of the 17th Century French prostitute (the time in which the story first comes); a parable of the sexual awakening or maturation of young women, the red cloak here being the young woman’s menstrual blood or hymen with the wolf threatening the young girl’s virginity and also as a warning against sexual predators lurking in the “dark forest” of the world.
Duffy brings a new twist to this story with Little Red Riding Hood being both sexual conquest (“I clung till dawn to his thrashing fur, for / what little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf?”) and saving woodcutter (“I took an axe to the wolf / as he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw / the glistening, virgin white of my grandmother’s bones. / I filled his old belly with stones. I stitched him up.”) making her both the victim and victor of the poem and story. This twist brings a 20th Century sensibility to a 300-year-old cautionary story, and makes it a tale that is current and immediate to female readers of the current age: they do not need to fear sex, but they also do not have to be the victim anymore.
“Fundamentals”: This is, perhaps, my favorite poem in Paterson and Simic’s anthology. Duhig has captured something very special and unique in his poem “Fundamentals”: the intersection of missionary and carnival barker, the clash of 19th and 20th Century sensibilities.
As Contemporary Britain comes to terms with the effects of its 19th Century imperialism, Duhig shows just how ridiculous some of these efforts were, and just how far from Christian dogma they really were.
The “missionary” in Duhig’s poem is one part Victorian missionary (probably Anglican or Episcopalian), one part carnival barker and one part P.T. Barnum-esque showman. This is, looking back across the gulf of the last 100-150 years, what most of these missionaries embodied: the clash of pulpit and barker’s podium.
This is especially evident in Duhig’s missionary in that he seems less concerned about what could be said are the true fundamentals of Christianity and more concerned with these three things: “our God is different from your God, our God is better than your God / and my wife doesn’t like it when you watch her go to the toilet. / Grasp them and you have grasped the fundamentals of salvation” before moving on to perfunctory baptism and then the more important business of training native colonial subjects in the art of modern warfare and gunmanship.
This is what the imperialist effort was all about, the conquest of nations (especially those “uncivilized” ones in Africa and Asia and the Subcontinent) and then turning those subjects of the Crown into efficient cannon fodder for the next conquest (usually using tribal and racial prejudices and feuds to advantage).
“Fundamentals” captures all of these ideas and manages to marginalize them and make them seem off-hand or even inconsequential in light of the bigger facts of God, Queen and Country.
I guess that the bottom line here is that this collection of poetry is more than worth the cover price, if for no other reason than for these three poems alone. The rest of the gems that Paterson and Simic have collected in New British Poetry are simply icing on the cake.
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