WebMink
Simon Phipps's personal commentary

Staying Alive

I spent an hour this morning revisiting Neil Astley's wonderful and adult poetry anthology 'Staying Alive' [US|UK|CA] and once again I am in awe of his selection, accurately subtitled "real poems for unreal times". He's managed to assemble a profound and moving anthology where page after page I am placing markers.

With the skill of a photographer he juxtaposes different sources to gently illustrate the human condition. Today, for example, I was struck by Ted Hughes' 'Full Moon and Little Frieda' romanticising the naievety of childhood immediately followed by Frieda Hughes' 'Birds' criticising the coldness of an adult studying rather than loving a child. I also dipped in to the political and war poems sections and found them illuminating the present; C P Cavafy's 'Waiting for the Barbarians' illustrates the need we have for an enemy to distract us from political realities:

Now what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.

So much to gain from stillness with this book, I need more silence and time with it.

posted at 11:33 AM (UK) | |