If you read poetry every day, and then add in the hundreds of poets, thousands of poems under consideration for an anthology, you quickly start to privilege and value certain effects: those images which almost stammeringly refuse to take their leave; insistent rhythms sustained line after line; the knitting together of form and tone where tone presides; poems so engaging you want them to keep going and never stop. It becomes fascinating to see how one stand-out poem is accompanied, how a poet who writes one complete poem writes others, too.
Our conversations, our enthusiasms, singled out the poems and poets we chose. We did certainly go looking for new voices, believing that poets generally operate at an angle to communities. And reading back over this anthology, its abundance surprises, as does its good unruliness.
In ‘Education of the Poet’ Louise Glück, who has championed so many poets at the start of their careers, writes about growing up in ‘the worst possible family’, an ‘environment in which the right of any family member to complete the sentence of another was assumed […] in my family all discussion was carried on in that single cooperative voice.’ New Poetries VIII is not this kind of family and, even as we attempt to identify common elements, these poets as a group happily insist on completing their own sentences.
And so it should be. Carcanet grew out of the eponymous student magazine Michael took over in 1967 as an undergraduate. As Michael has recently written: ‘The Press was intended to be a brief, decisive swansong: to publish pamphlets by a few poets whose work Carcanet had encouraged, and then stop. But at the time poetry publishing was hardly thriving. New presses emerged – Fulcrum and Anvil in particular – but old lists were cautious, some were closing. Poets were in peril of losing, or had lost, publishers. There were poets from abroad, Anglophone and other, who ought to have been part of our diet. When Poetry Nation, then PN Review got going, the press was caught up in a hopeless enthusiasm which persists.
Carcanet has been backward- and forward-looking at the same time. Age and experience do not count against poets; and we had, and have, a weak spot for poet-critics. Being British or belonging to a specific school did not matter. We were at odds with the then “establishment”. The editorial principle then as now is, Wait to be surprised. Submissions which make you read aloud are off to a good start. If they surprise by rightness, and by a relation to larger traditions, modernist or otherwise, they engage us.
Particularism would be our philosophy, if we had one. It entails a resistance to theories and “schools”, to family resemblances. To say more would risk a limiting definition…’
In this eighth anthology, the poets share a canny sense of the neighbourhood in which they exercise their gift, not unaware of language’s systems and tendencies, and history’s surprises (Brexit, say, or a pandemic), which might suddenly illuminate or shadow or anyway redefine the ways in which the poems will be read. Jade Cuttle might speak for many of them, and us, when she draws our attention to her poems’ interest in ‘the unruly self’, and their resistance to ‘flatpacking the endless contradictions of identity into one single neat space’. Stav Poleg prefaces her poems’ cinematic scene-switching with Wittgenstein’s own meditation on the self’s protean shapeshifting: ‘When one means something, it is oneself that means,’ before declaring, ‘The process of working on a poem often feels to me like that of getting lost.’ This book’s twenty-four poets might be considered as invitations, for the time you spend in their company, to lose yourself.
The failures of the Baedeker or Lonely Planet have long been a prompt to poets: Tristram Fane Saunders writes, ‘The guidebook says so many things, but we can’t hear it / over the water falling everywhere and on the blue pagoda.’ He insists on the undiscovered, the overlooked spaces, hidden tones and feelings to which his poems attest. It might be Christine Roseeta Walker’s Negril, Jamaica or the Catalan and Wexford silences in which Colm Tóibín’s poems specialise, or the Suffolk landscape, or better, world of Rebecca Hurst’s ‘Mapping the Woods’:
Count the ways in:
the tracks and driftways,
sheere-ways and bostals,
gaps, twittens and stiles.
Loop round and back again.
These Wealden hills burn us up
– the effort of taking them in the snow
Maybe we can see in these poems a poetics that stresses other worlds, and how the poems’ speakers acknowledge habitats and lives, and language, other than their own. Jade Cuttle’s alphabet tilts at the very basis of what written language does, its foraging and re-orientation matched by Nell Prince’s ‘Isle’, which asks us to notice otherworldly poplars that will become ‘our judges / before the bone silence, the no-return’. For Jenny King in ‘Point of Balance’, our focus, at best, is ‘a balancing, attention / pulled thinly sideways as the moments pass.’ The brilliant, iconic poems of Jason Allen-Paisant also pull sideways, asking us, demanding of us: ‘Imagine daffodils in the corner / of a sound system / in Clapham’.
These poets do not just imagine other ways of seeing, they also bring all their wit and formal resources to bear on difficult inheritances and other histories. How hard it is to get things down right! Parwana Fayyaz achieves this with her remarkable litanies, which haunt her poems’ occasions, as do both the Iranian and Mancunian scenes of Maryam Hessavi’s, and Joseph Minden’s playful sonnet sequences and painful meditations on what is forgotten, and what is memorialised.
As we read these selected poems and poets together one unusual preoccupation dominated, perhaps related to the larger sense that we are writers of the Anthropocene: the draw of tides and elemental water for these poets’ imagining of another world. Benjamin Nehammer’s coastal cityscapes notice ‘quiet reaches of the surf / Stranger and stranger in the reeds’; Charlotte Eichler entangles the human and animal worlds, her cuttlefish
speak a patterned language
of moody stripes and flashes,
the signs of love imprinted
on their skin,
leave their eggs
like a dropped necklace,
ruffled versions of themselves
suspended in each blackened bead.
Joe Carrick-Varty wishfully interweaves private disaster and non-human vitality: ‘Every time a whale is born albino / a man doesn’t die of liver failure and every time / it rains at sea a child speaks first words’; Jennifer Edgecombe’s voice-driven poems inhabit that seascape: ‘I asked him when he’ll be round the corner / we call Land’s End the corner / he said about just after tea’; Holly Hopkins’ North American Loon ‘will shoot her call like a flare / and it will hang / over the office workers of Whitehall’; Suzannah V. Evans’s amazing starfish and barnacles have the gift of being utterly at home in their environment:
Barnacles balancing though tightly balancing
breathing and balancing and barnacled
brittle blushes all spiny and together and a beginning
beginning to merge the brittle blushing objects, all briny.
These poems might wish for such easy belonging, but they register instead a separateness which can be confrontational, or neighbourly, or, sometimes, passionately identifying and engaged.
One of Padraig Regan’s ingenious, passionate poems about what we eat, ‘Katsu Ika Odori-Don’, observes the preparation of a squid dish: horrified, drawn in, it is also a meditation on elegiac distance: ‘I know what animates this bunch of tentacles: / it’s just the salt in the soy filling the blanks in the dead nerves.’ Isobel Williams’s startlingly inventive Catullus relishes both the body and its own attempts to resuscitate, decorate and despoil its subjects: ‘I’ll squirt correctly spelt obscene graffiti / All over your façade’, she writes; Conor Cleary’s recycling is more practical, a stove emerging from cans as he ‘punctured neat holes in them with a corkscrew / and poured in a bright purple ethanol’, while Victoria Kennefick’s dramatic monologues bring such transformations of speech and body very close together: her St Catherine exclaims,
Oh, Bonaventura, I am a house of sticks,
my bones rattle with desire until I lick it.
I feel it quiver, alive on my tongue.
Swapping poems and notes in a locked down northern city, this profligate Babel of new poetries emerged out of the tidal swells it still withstands: we came back again and again to the pleasures the poets afforded us, to the suddenness with which their poems spoke to us, something caught by Hal Coase’s ‘The Beginnings’:
I like poems that start with a bird stuck in a chimneybreast
or even better in a living room
where everyone’s screaming and there’s purple shit
everywhere and mum acknowledges the problem,
ideally
with an old-school touch of humour:
‘And who invited you?’
John McAuliffe
2021