Not surprisingly, the author refers to climate change, quoting Hopkins “After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.” Not that there’s anything admonitory or prophetic about the collection itself. Its value lies instead in its scope.
Sheers states that he responded to the hills and coast of South Wales long before he ever became involved with writing poetry, or even reading it. But this collection shows him as strongly loyal to his present-day peers, and his immediate predecessors — it’s very wide-ranging in its selection from 20th century poets.
And anthologies are frequently the main places where lesser-known writers survive. T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence and Ted Hughes can look after themselves. But how many editions of Edwin Muir, Louis MacNeice or Peter Porter stand on people’s shelves these days, not to mention Jo Shapcott, Sean O’Brien and Daljit Nagra?
Sheers also points out that a primary characteristic of landscape poetry is of the new meeting the old. The individual comes to what he sees as a new scene, then quickly realizes that it’s been there for far, far longer, and that others have seen it very much as it still is who had totally different assumptions and ways of seeing. At the same time, though, Sheers says that most landscapes aren’t really natural, but the result of man’s interaction with what was there originally. Imagining historical events taking place just where you’re standing now is thus a frequent recourse of landscape poets.
One such poem made me laugh out loud. It’s called At Swarkestone, the Derbyshire village where Bonnie Prince Charlie stopped on his southwards invasion of England in 1745. It begins:
He turned back here. Anyone would. After
The long romantic journey from the North
To be faced with this. A ‘so what?’ sort of place ...
The poem continues:
He could have done it. The German Royals
Had packed their bags, there was a run
On the Bank of England, London stood open as jelly,
Nobody could have stopped him. This place did ...
I feel I know many such dull English places. But I didn’t know the poet, U.A. Fanthorpe, before opening this book. But then such pleasant encounters are what we really value the best anthologies for.
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