Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy (13 page)

Michael Coady
(
b
. Carrick-on-Suir, Co. Tipperary, Ireland, 1939) is a poet, short story writer and photographer whose work explores the universal in the local, celebrating town and country, people and place in Ireland.
‘Though There Are Torturers’ [107].

David Constantine
(
b
. Salford, 1944) is an English poet known also for his translations of poets such as Enzensberger, Goethe, Hölderlin and Jaccottet. Like the work of the European poets who have nourished him, his poetry is informed by a profoundly humane vision of the world. Throughout his work, the personal life, with its own joys and suffering, asserts itself against a world whose characteristic forces are dispiriting and destructive. For Constantine, all personal life and all poetry written from it deal with the realities of social and political life in the here and now, assert themselves, fight for survival, and actively seek to make a world in which humane self-realisation would be more and more, not less and less, possible. ‘Common and Particular’ [
114].

Imtiaz Dharker
is a poet, artist and documentary filmmaker. Her cultural experience spans three countries: born in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1954, she grew up a Muslim Calvinist in Glasgow, later eloping with a Hindu Indian to live in Bombay. She now lives between India and Britain, drawing her main themes from a life of transitions: childhood, exile, journeying, home, religious strife and terror. Her poetry has universal appeal, especially in these times. When I read her poem ‘They’ll say, “She must be from another country”’ [
109] at the launch reading for the American edition of
Staying Alive
at New York’s Cooper Union in 2003, the whole audience of several hundred people burst into spontaneous applause.

Michael Donaghy
(
b
. New York City, 1954-2004) was an Irish-American poet and musician who moved to London in his 30s, and was a phenomenal reader of his work. His playfully serious poetry owed much to the example of 17th-century Metaphysical poets like John Donne, often elaborating an unusual metaphor or combination of metaphors through many narrative shifts and surprises, much to the delight of audiences at his
tour-de-force
performances. His sudden death at the age of 50 came as a great shock to his many friends in the poetry community in Britain.
‘The Present’ [86].

Mark Doty
(
b
. Maryville, Tennessee, 1953) is an American writer noted for the compassion, relish and wild muscularity of
his highly personal poetry. Central to Doty’s work are animals and his concern for the need to cope nobly and gracefully with what is beyond our control. Exploring our preoccupation with the past and the future, he encourages us to live more in the present. His poetry universalises themes of loss, mortality and renewal, and expresses a remarkable empathy for all human and animal life. He has published several collections, including
My Alexandria
(1993) and
Atlantis
(1995), which deal poignantly with the failing health and ultimate death of his partner from AIDS and with his almost crippling grief – also the subject of his prose memoir
Heaven’s Coast
(1996).
‘Migratory’ [34].

Rita Dove
(
b
. Akron, Ohio, 1952), the daughter of one of the first black chemists to work in America’s tyre industry, was the youngest US Poet Laureate (in 1993-95) and to date the only African-American poet to hold that office. Her poetry is known for its lyricism as well as for its personalised sense of history, political scope and diverse themes, from the Civil Rights era to music and dance. She edited the eclectic
Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry
(2011).
‘Dawn Revisited’ [18].

Alan Dugan
(
b
. New York City, 1923-2003) was an idiosyncratic American poet who titled all his collections
Poems
, culminating in
Poems Seven
in 2001. His poetry is ironic and down-to-earth, his language skilfully drawing on everyday speech, his stance often disenchanted, at odds with society and despairing of the world, but accepting what is necessary for survival, especially in love and marriage, as in ‘Love Song: I and Thou’ [
63]

Helen Dunmore
is an English poet, novelist and children’s writer who won the first Orange Prize for fiction in 1996. Born in Beverley, Yorkshire, in 1952, she has lived in Bristol for most of her life, but the place which has exerted the greatest pull on her imagination has been Cornwall: the land, the sea and the light. Her poems capture the fleetingness of life, its sweetness and intensity, the short time we have on earth and the pleasures of the earth, with death as the frame which sharpens everything and gives it shape.
‘Wild strawberries’ [58].

Stephen Dunn
(
b
. New York City, 1939) started out as a semi-professional basketball player, worked in advertising and served in the US Army, experiences which must have helped ground his poetry, with its concern with the anxieties, joys and problems of how to co-exist in the world with those who are part of our daily lives. No fewer than five poems in
Staying Alive,
including ‘Sweetness’ [
106], were taken from his 1989 collection,
Between Angels
, a book remarkable for its portrayal of ‘our human vulnerability and our quiet everyday tenacity, perhaps courage, in the face of those vulnerabilities’ [Steve Kronen,
Kenyon Review
].