A Poet’s Guide to Britain is a companion piece to a BBC TV series in which the young poet Owen Sheers, who was brought up in South Wales, introduced British landscape poems to the accompaniment of film of the country they described. The book doesn’t contain any photographs, however, and so is essentially an anthology of poems old and new, grouped into six sections.
The attraction of anthologies is what they contain that you don’t know already. Of course they’re sure to include many familiar pieces, and a few extremely familiar ones. These are, as it were, their backbone, what gives the collection authenticity and authority. But it’s the lesser-known items that give such books their essential quality. What has this anthologist discovered that, if were not for him, you’d never have come across?
The most impressive poem in this book that was new to me was a substantial extract from an even longer poem by Tony Harrison, the poet and dramatist born in 1937 in working-class Yorkshire. I should have known the poem, called simply v., if only because its proposed adaptation for TV once caused an uproar in sections of the British press. But I didn’t, and the extract printed here was a revelation.
In it, Harrison visits his parents’ grave only to find it vandalized by football fans. One had sprayed United over it. Harrison, while admitting this to be “an accident of meaning to redeem/ an act intended as mere desecration,” nonetheless writes as follows:
Though I don’t believe in afterlife at all
and know it’s cheating it’s hard not to make
a sort of furtive prayer from this skin’s scrawl,
his UNITED mean ‘in Heaven’ for their sake.
I found this so impressive that I looked up the complete poem online. It contains a brilliant stanza inexplicably left out of this selection, as follows:
Some, where kids use aerosols, use giant signs
to let the people know who’s forged their fetters
like PRI CE O WALES above West Yorkshire mines
(no prizes for who nicked the missing letters!)
Readers in Taiwan may need to be informed that in the UK there’s an ultra-right-wing anti-immigrant party called the National Front, or NF. “Nicked” is UK slang for “stole.” Tony Harrison’s frequent adoption, incidentally, of the accents of what in the UK is sometimes called “uneducated speech” is a self-imposed manner. The reality is that he’s a classics graduate.
Of Sheer’s six sections — cities, villages, mountains, islands, woods, and the sea — I was surprised to find the first the most enjoyable. London is evoked in many poems old and new, but poems on other British cities — Liverpool, Birmingham, Cardiff, Newcastle, Manchester and more — were constantly surprising and pleasurable.
For the rest, there are three extremely predictable extracts from Shakespeare (not by nature a landscape poet, but one of dramatic conflict) and many very well-known ones by Wordsworth, Hopkins, Marvell, and so on. These can be quickly passed over in the search for the new and the fresh, and you feel they are included to provide the publishers with the possibility that the book will be bought up in large numbers for use in schools.
In his introduction Sheers describes how he put the collection together in the Allen Room of the New York Public Library, with the UK over 3,000 miles (4,830km) away. He left every day with his head full of British images, he says, and it’s hard not to think how readers in Taiwan could easily enjoy the same experience.
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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