Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy (2 page)

Staying Alive, Being Alive and Being Human
have introduced many thousands of new readers to contemporary poetry, and have helped poetry lovers to discover the little known riches of world poetry. With each book in the trilogy already offering the reader 500 essential poems, choosing 100 essential poems for this pocketbook edition from their carefully chosen selections of 1500 poems was always going to be an impossible task.

Staying Alive
was never meant to be a definitive anthology of modern poetry, nor was its sequel
Being Alive
or its companion volume
Being Human
. Each was intended to be a helpful guide for new readers as well as a world poetry map showing more territory than most poetry readers would have come across. All three anthologies do of course include some of most significant poems of modern times, but that is not their purpose, so there would have been no point in producing a smaller anthology including just the poems said to have the highest critical standing. This is not a
best of
anthology but a compilation I’ve made for readers who’ve wanted a more portable travel companion drawn from the three chunky paperbacks, both in the form of this pocketbook and also as an e-book. I hope it may serve too as a taster for anyone unfamiliar with the individual anthologies.

In drawing up my selection for this condensed edition, I have been especially conscious and respectful of how readers have come to view the three books in
Staying Alive
trilogy as testifying in a deeply personal way to their own love of poetry as well as somehow validating their relationship with particular poems which have been important to them in their lives.

These anthologies are quite unlike any other books I’ve edited or published. These are books for which I receive fan mail from people from all walks of life, and the sense I get from the extraordinary correspondence they have generated, and from feedback offered all the time by people who come up to me at events, is that they really
do
have their own following, as if each book were an author with its loyal readership. People don’t just read these books and keep them by their bedside, they keep giving them as presents. And so this body of readers grows: all those
people out there who see the three anthologies as their books, a kind of shared testament to our common humanity expressed in poems. When I edited the third anthology,
Being Human
– and then when assembling this one – I felt an acute sense of responsibility to that readership, a connection with all those people who’ve put their trust in me to deliver this particular kind of book which they won’t just read once but will re-read again and again; and who will feel a special bond with the poems, and will want to share them with others.

Staying Alive
is still being discovered by new readers. Ten years on I’m still receiving letters, postcards, phone calls and emails expressing people’s appreciation, all saying how much
Staying Alive
had helped or stimulated them and fired up their interest in poetry; and then that happened also with
Being Alive
and
Being Human
.

Talismanic poems were a popular feature of
Staying Alive
, notably Mary Oliver’s ‘Wild Geese’ and ‘The Journey’. They then became integral to my selections for
Being Alive
and
Being Human
. These are the kinds of poems that people keep in their wallets, on fridges and noticeboards; poems copied to friends and read on special occasions. Such has been the appeal of
Staying Alive
and
Being Alive
that numerous readers wrote not only to express their appreciation of these books, but also to share poems which they had found helpful, empowering or affirming. I drew on this highly unusual publisher’s mailbag for
Being Human
, including many talismanic personal survival poems suggested by readers from all walks of life, along with others named by writers at readings and in newspaper articles and blogs. Examples of these include, in particular, poems by Robert Frost, Jane Hirshfield, Langston Hughes and Rilke.

What many of these talismanic poems have in common is a wake-up call to people trying to live meaningful lives in a secular world without certainties, where so much that happens is outside anyone’s control, and the individual is pressured to conform to the will of others. And that acquiescence involves not only subservience to dominant political, social or religious codes of behaviour but also submission to capitalism’s market-driven, media-pandered consumer society. There are many different kinds of poets represented in these anthologies whose
work stands in opposition to those forces and speaks for the crushed or embattled individual, from Ireland’s Louis MacNeice to Estonia’s Doris Kareva.

Human understanding and intimacy are created not out of imposed order or striving for perfection but through acceptance of difficulty, inadequacy, imperfection, making do, shortage of time, as recognised here in poems by writers as various as Alan Dugan, U.A. Fanthorpe and Jaan Kaplinski. Yehuda Amichai’s ‘A Man in His Life’ concludes: ‘A man doesn’t have time in his life / to have time for everything.’ Warnings against wasting that one life and denying our hopes or dreams crop up again and again in these poems, most famously in Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’, which ends ‘You must change your life’, a call to action which has been picked up by numerous poets as well as by readers taking these poems to heart.

As in the individual anthologies, I have “orchestrated” the selections here in such a way as to bring these kinds of connections between poems alive for the reader, so that poems will seem to talk to one another, with themes picked up and developed through several poems. Given this smaller space in which to present one poem after another, I’ve tried to give the whole selection a narrative arc, similar to that of the many readings I’ve done from the three anthologies at festivals and poetry venues over the past ten years. Those readings have been shared with poets, and my selections here include poems they’ve wanted to read at those events as well as poems which audiences have loved or connected with.

Another popular feature of the three anthologies was my inclusion of brief notes on poets and poems in the short introductions to each section. I couldn’t do that for all 500 poems, but I have been able to add comments on the hundred poems in this selection at the back of the book. This is yet one more way in which I’ve tried to make this anthology responsive to what readers have wanted.

And now it is
your book,
dear reader. I do hope it will travel with you and be a life companion in poems.

NEIL ASTLEY